Pros
OfferUp was the first organization in my life I truly felt part of. There are not many tech companies where the product by its very nature brings good into the world. And, for most of my time there, I felt a sense of family and belonging, which made me really happy. I felt valued as a person and felt I could make a difference. After listening to the CEO and one of our PMs talk about how it would be nice to be able to move around seating arrangements, I suggested wheels on desks and our CEO there and then made a call. After seeing how a lot of people seemed depressed, I was able to talk to the head of our community team about how I thought being able to see our customers' stories more would help us feel more connected to what we were building and it then became a feature of our all hands to have a user come in and tell us their story of using the app. And, while I was on the engagement team, I felt really connected to my PM and could even help relieve his workload by helping to drive several features.
Kontras
But, apparently, with our rapid growth last year, a lot of politics developed. And, as a result, we lost many of the people I respected the most, three of the best PMs you could ever work with, a rockstar content strategist/strings master, and pretty much our entire design team. As I had written the MVP for our new shipping feature, when we did a re-org, I reluctantly changed from the engagement team to the shipping team. And that is when work stopped being fun. I would repeatedly see large issues before they truly manifested in the decisions of the shipping team leadership, but when I told said leadership about them I was consistently ignored, and only after those issues manifested and the entire team complained would they be addressed, if ever. The features I was working on would change almost every day due to the entire team rushing and not taking the time to fully spec everything out and, as a client developer, I would usually be the one to catch any design, product, backend, data science, or client intersection issues, so most of my days were spent talking to people and helping to fix these problems, often without any thanks. And, most importantly, despite these issues being brought up in three separate retrospectives, nothing ever seemed to change. I kept trying, however, and kept bringing up the issues. And, for that, I was put on probation and given an offer to leave. I loved the company and, were I to quit or be fired, I knew I wanted to take a break rather than immediately finding another job, so I waited, attempted to moderate my stress levels, and tried to see if the mess that was going on would change. It didn't, and, as I expected, a whole lot of features slipped their deadlines. I was finally fed up and asked if I could change teams and two work days later, right when I thought I would be changing teams and things would get better, I was fired and spent about an hour crying.
