Razorpay engineering - a rant
Razorpay probably has the most overrated engineering culture from the outsider's perspective. Everytime on Twitter there's some npc telling how Razorpay is a dream place to work at or how Razorpay engineering is the holy grail. From inside it's hilarious that someone could even think of those things. There's no learning path, especially in payments business unit for engineers who are forever stuck in ad hoc tasks. There's no long term plan, no roadmap, just PM and EMs shoving down and hocs. Even in terms of learning from peers, there are so few charters where someone works with a lead, mostly it's just slogging it out alone in an ad hoc or some bug fix. It's almost always an eternal cycle of never working in impactful projects -> never get assigned one, because there are so few -> get average reviews -> again being asked to work on "impactful projects". If anyone is under 3/4 yoe they should stay away from razorpay for their careers sake.
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Let me tell you a secret - this is true for all great companies large and small. Internally, they are all pretty much a shit show once you’ve worked there long enough.
Every place is going to have problems. As the great bob Marley said - everyone is going to break your heart eventually; you just gotta find the ones worth sticking for
Great advice @TechBro . What parameters do you evaluate a company on to decide if it's " worth sticking for" and how frequently do you have this assessment?
One of my previous company manager used to have a happiness index document and all her reportees were asked to fill it. It consisted of 5-6 factors and we were supposed to rate each of this factors from 1-5. Factors were like
- Compensation
- On Job learning
- Work culture
- Team bonding And if the average rating was below 3 on some factors then we actively worked on those areas. And we did this exercise twice a year. It seemed stupid at first but made sense once we got hang of it.
Have heard similar feedback about endless migrations and not so interesting work at razorpay.
Yeah man, when someone asks for challenging work, the max they'll do is change your team, where after 1 month of new domain wala feeling, it all goes back to the same cycle of mundane work, ad hocs and repeat.
But surprisingly they pay quite decent for such mundane work. Their recruiter was okay to go till 55 base for sde3.
One of my previous company manager used to have a happiness index document and all her reportees were asked to fill it. It consisted of 5-6 factors and we were supposed to rate each of this factors from 1-5. Factors were like
- Compensation
- On Job learning
- Work culture
- Team bonding And if the average rating was below 3 on some factors then we actively worked on those areas. And we did this exercise twice a year. It seemed stupid at first but made sense once we got hang of it.
Most priciest and accent Focused PMs come from Razorpay
A current razorpay employee here, Engineers and PMs are treated and paid like Princes. Come to Ops habibi and see how things are shit in Operations at Razorpay. Only engineers and PMs and technical guys are respected here.
We'll, first of all this post isn't about pay scale at all and it isn't razorpay's fault that the market values tech guys and PMs much more highly than ops, remember razorpay is a tech company first and foremost, so this is expected and I'd be worried if it was other way around.
Thats true. I agree
How is the product culture over there. I had positive notion about PM roles and had almost got an offer for a PM2 role. Glad, i didn't join .
It depends on which business unit the role is for. For payments, there is barely any product innovation happening, and PMs are mostly just dealing with small optimizations here and there. One funny incident was when to introduce 1 API it took 2 months in just deciding the schema. Granted it's critical but come on man, how slow can you be. It's just a growth killer at this point.
Forget the UX team which does
Utter bullshite
I guess if it's a matured product, then this would be the case with all such orgs.
This is helpful. Thanks for the insight.