Pros
– Lots of free food, parties and alcohol. If you’re a “bro” then you’ll have a great time.
Cons– Tumblr is run on a tangled mess of homegrown tools, horrendously fragile code and the worst engineering practices I’ve ever seen from any company. There is no QA, code reviews aren’t taken seriously, anyone can commit to master and push their code to production at any time. The entire development process can best be described as institutionalized cowboy coding.
– Brogramming is real and Tumblr exemplifies it. It was the norm for bros to knowingly push buggy, incomplete, untested code into production after a few rounds of drinks then leave the problems for others while they moved onto another project.
– Engineering management is filled with dead weight who have been loyal and stuck around long enough. They aren’t qualified to lead teams, they have horrendous technical knowledge and do absolutely nothing to help grow the careers of their subordinates.
– Every position from VPs down to engineers are a revolving door, every week at least one person quits and the one thing that the people who quit have in common is that they were very good at their jobs. I can safely say that if you see someone has been at Tumblr more than six months they are looking for a new job; if they are there for two years or more they are probably incompetent. Absolutely no one who has options stays at Tumblr.
– New employees, no matter how experienced, are treated like they are complete idiots. Recently, I watched someone who had more experience than everyone on his team quit out of frustration. His manager told other people that he was useless and contributed nothing. What the manager didn’t realize was the same person he called useless had accepted a more senior role at Google.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Tumblr-Reviews-E458427.htm
lol
its beautiful
(via wellmanicuredman)
Why am I not surprised?
(via madamehardy)
Other “cons” found in the reviews:
“Products rushed to market without adequate testing”
“Company was a big [sic] confused in terms of what direction to take and employees could feel this.“
… and my favorite: “Get some competent product leaders and some actual UI specialists.”
(via pearwaldorf)
my mom has been a coder from way back, like she helped write the first ATM networks and stuff, and she worked with a guy who liked to dump his buggy ass code into the production machine and then leave for the weekend or a vacation or whatever
the systems administrator had a process that would remove any changes he’d made
dude never did run anything on the test box without being told to and never got fired for it
(via kaninchenzero)
a lot of things just started making sense
(via ultralaser)
… no, hang on, I just.
– There’s a complete lack of engineering best practices, their codebase is so fragmented, fragile, tangled and highly unreadable. Minor changes to the code cannot be made without risking the entire site going down. They don’t use continuous integration to test against anything and do not have the technical capital to even being writing tests. It’s shocking beyond belief…
– You get a really strange vibe from everyone in the office, people talk badly about others behind their backs and sometimes within earshot. Lots of inter-office romantic relationships.
– It’s a rotating door, nobody really stays for more than 1-2 years, many people including directors have left the company even before their stock reached it’s 1 year vesting cliff. This kills morale when nobody likes the company enough to stay.
– Morale is terrible after the acquisition, people talk poorly about yahoo and make fun of how old and outdated yahoo is as a company yet tumblr itself is old and outdated. The traffic to the website has plummeted on a monthly basis.
– A very small percent of the early employees have stayed and those who have keep talking down upon the newer employees
– They’ve built tons of custom, in house services which constantly break because they were so poorly written which makes being on call an absolute nightmare.
– Top it off with a few rats run around in the Manhattan HQ
This sounds like such a horror story, somebody write the gothic-meme version of this office please
(via grajing)
This explains a great deal about the problems with this site that this Operation aims to combat.
(via operation-highlord)
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