Engineering department is not good. Stay away - Software Engineer Arlo Technologies Employee Review

Another year and no promotion. The Engineering department here does not offer any career path and offshores all possible openings. The leads here are required to send all work offshore to consultants who are not counted as reportees and becomes challenging for promotions to manager level. The HR claims we are top heavy by counting all project managers and product managers as managers as per their convenience while having managers in their org without any reportees at all. The product spec are completely revamped at last minute, Engineering is told to start without PRD, PRD changes are considered as implicit requirements, all corner cases are left to dev team to figure out and address within the same timeline The timeline is not created based on project plan but is driven by management without consideration for quality. When you ask the product managers how the feature is supposed to work, they literally open up Ring app or Life 360 to check how it is implemented there. Program managers redirect questions on status to dev instead of maintaining tracking pages, Internal politics, frustration and day night work with constant reorgs. Loads of meetings and all meetings become bug scrubs without any PM presence everything gets marked as a blocker which dev has to argue to change to change in requirements. The other groups in CIO / Finance / HR are lucky, they have good growth options and gets rewarded on basic work, unlike engineering where its mostly "crime and punishments" only. In non Engineering orgs, as soon as someone submits resignation they get promoted. If they leave anyways, next in line gets promoted with responsibilities. In Engineering, they do not give any opportunity to internal team members, get a new person from outside, so people staying in for some time have no motivation to perform at any level. Glassdoor reached out to me with a comment that this review contains strong language, which I do agree, but they also said that it does meet their guidelines, for which I appreciate them. Perhaps someone from Arlo reached out to them for this. What I have written here is honestly correct. This is exactly what happens in engineering team. It may be because of market pressure and product is of course complex , but going this unplanned is not an excuse. I have worked in other places also, but never so much last min unplanned stuff.