A dysfunctional engineering organization - Software Engineer DigitalOcean Employee Review

The engineering organization is plagued by a bad re-org that started about a year ago but has gotten progressively worse. Teams are split into “pillars” with no plan on how those teams are meant to interface across the pillars. Communication from leadership is poor leading to isolated pockets of engineering and a product that is becoming increasingly inconsistent and confusing. Best practices and engineering standards are nonexistent as each team has freedom to do whatever they want, unchecked. Quality of leadership varies wildly from parts of the engineering organization as each pillar is responsible for its own hiring practices. On more than one occasion, hiring managers have hired their personal friends and former coworkers into roles. The company hires only generalists as engineers. You have people who are Rails experts setting up and maintaining databases. Engineers who would prefer to work on Golang are writing Javascript. This leads to general frustration and a lower quality of work. The remote benefits are so great that employees stay, even if they’re unhappy. DigitalOcean pays NYC salaries to people living all over the world, creating an unbeatable offer that people can’t leave. While this might seem like a pro, in reality it means you have a large number of disgruntled employees that feel stuck. Middle management is increasing at a rapid pace. A large majority of the new management/leadership is being hired externally, with a few very rare exceptions for internal promotion. There’s little opportunity to grow with the company as an engineer. The career promotion process is very poorly defined and documented and results in a lot of confusion and frustration across engineers. People are left wondering how and when they should ask for a promotion as that seems to be the only way that people get raises or promoted to new levels. For a long period of time there was no CTO, then there was a CTO for just under a year who worked outside of the main office and never spoke to engineers, even when the engineering organization was still relatively small. She’s since left, leaving the organization with no C-level technical leadership. With the increase in middle management and a lack of technical vision/leadership it feels increasingly isolating to be an individual contributor in the organization.