Worst experience of my professional career. Stay far, far away. - Senior Software Engineer Vacasa Employee Review

1. Comically bad compensation. This is the #1 issue you will hear from inside the company. When interviewing for similar positions in the area, I was routinely offered 40% - 80% higher salary. This all happens while the top leadership boasts about how much they are personally worth. 2. Nepotism abound. The only real path to advancement is to have, be married to, or be old buddies with a member of a certain family. 3. Micro-management. At one point, our team had a standup in the morning, a "pre-lunch" checkin, and an evening checkin on our calendar. These would be interspersed often with private messages from various people asking about how the feature/bug/document was coming. On one particular day, I updated the team about the status of a bug during standup, was asked about it an hour later by a PM who was in the standup. Then asked about it an hour after that by a director and asked about it an hour after that by another director who had never interacted with me before. The PM then asked again in the afternoon, telling me a C-level executive was personally asking about it... all this for a bug that had been sitting in the backlog for about 6 months. It was not deemed high priority during planning the prior week. 4. The wrong people in the wrong places. - I moved halfway across the county for this job. Over about 40 in-person, 1:1 meetings with my manager, the overwhelming majority of feedback I heard was "you can probably do my job." I definitely could, because I did the entire job. My manager was not familiar with any of the tech stack we worked with and made no attempt to learn it. This resulted in making embarrassing technical choices virtually every feature. When asked how we fix that process, the feedback from the team was always "have a better voice in the room when planning." That never happened, even though we repeatedly asked for it. I wrote his slides for company meetings. I wrote his technical documents to present to leadership. I reviewed every single PR that our team of 5 developers deployed because he didn't know the tech. I coded POC's for him to present to the company for technical consideration. I wrote the vast majority of JIRA tickets we identified and worked on... ... and as he left the company, he recommended to his manager (who I've never spoken to) that I wasn't the right guy to succeed him for the job. - Vacasa in insanely bureaucratic for it's size. I spent years in an 125000+ employee aerospace company and was significantly close to leadership than I was at Vacasa. As mentioned, I never spoke to my manger's director. That was by Vasasa's design. - As a friend was leaving the company for compensation reasons (see point 1), a C-level member chider her for "making a bad career move in chasing money." - The only management "technique" I ever encountered when trying to resolve issues presented in retro ("low morale" appeared on our retro board for about 4 months straight) was a member of the team expressing frustrations about being lied to/misled/not heard and a member of leadership defending their actions, saying "Well, that sounds reasonable to me." That was it. That's how every single problem was addresses. The only exceptions to this was the time I was told repeatedly "I encourage you find another job if you don't like how we work." when trying to address micro-management issues. I was then told I could be replaced with a few interns. 5. Hilariously out of touch leadership. See examples below: - Compounding the compensation problem (see point 1), leadership often (probably an average of every other week throughout the year) asks people to VOLUNTEER THEIR TIME to clean the rental units. Vacasa employs housekeepers are part of staff. When challenged that maybe the business should hire more housekeepers, leadership DOUBLED DOWN and claimed it was "part of the Vacasa experience." Yes, the experience to directly richen a certain family who happens to comprise 80% of top leadership by devaluing the very people that work for you. - During one company meeting, a member of top leadership joked that employees would now have a chance for compensation increase quarterly. The room went silent because compensation is a huge issue at the company (see point 1). He then said "just kidding" and laughed at his own joke. - Top leadership repeatedly complains publicly about the product I work on because it is not a direct revenue generator. It was not uncommon for a C-level executive to directly ask to our team about a minuscule bug report every day, multiple times a day until it is addressed. This happens while also loudly complaining that the product "doesn't make us any money." - I have sat in a meeting where it was explained to me that the company should NOT engineer any solutions that aren't "supporting our best IP," (which our team is not considered) and therefore we should look to buy vs build for all features. A week later a request was denied to purchase a software license to complete a task and we were asked to "find a way to do it for free."