The work environment at Snap doesn't even sound that bad, sadly.
* A weirdly culty first day? Plenty of tech companies do weird stuff like that, especially startup-adjacent recent IPOs.
* Incompetent bosses with confusing org charts and poor management skills? Not exactly uncommon in tech!
* Shitty vesting schedules (10/20/30/40 at Snap) -- see Amazon and quite a few other top tech employers.
* Tons of time wasted in sprint planning "marathons" and sprint reviews? Honestly, the 5 hours of planning time per sprint isn't even the worst I've personally experienced. Tends to show up when you have crappy managers with too many direct reports and a tendency towards micromanagement.
* Managers and HR "forgetting" spoken-word arrangements for remote work and vacations -- again, par for the course. A valuable lesson here that you ought to get this stuff in writing, insist on it in email form at the very least, perhaps CC'd to your manager's manager, before you can consider it real. Though I'm not sure how many companies, pre-covid, would honestly allow an software dev to work remotely for a "few weeks" both in the summer and around the holidays when they don't support remote work primarily.
I'm glad Marko got to spend some time with his father before he passed away, so at least there's a happy ending here. Just goes to show that even a crappy work situation can still teach you valuable lessons, and that you really really need to do your due diligence to identify these cultural issues before you sign an offer!
Small correction: while it is still technically true about Amazon, starting around 2019 or 2020, they made a change to somewhat address this. Their offers now also give a cash grant that is supposed to make up that difference due to backloaded vesting schedule for the first two years compared to the latter two.
Who has time or energy to play the games you describe as mitigations anyway?
Also, money means different things to different people. If I had to work four years for a retirement amount I would.
I don’t feel that your comment adds much other than “other people have it worse,” which isn’t a useful contribution and misses the point.
Can confirm, just feel bad for the author, had he stuck around, with the backloaded vesting in 20 and 21, he'd easily afford the "excessively luxurious building that I could never in my life afford to live in"
But I’m happy that they found their way.
If Marko ever runs into John again, he can point out the words "epic" and "epoch" derive from Greek, not Latin.
