Pluspunten
The product is good. The mission is real. People are smart. Fully remote, good benefits.
Minpunten
This was my dream job from the outside. My hiring process took 2+ months. I thought it was thorough, but it was actually a preview. You'll be sold autonomy you don't have. Everything entails kick-offs, mid-mortems, and ship reviews where executives debate icon padding. The only thing you'll own at DuckDuckGo is Asana tasks, while you manage a process that owns you. A few hours of work easily become a two-week project with subtasks, dependencies, advisors, and stakeholders. Process weight compares to banks and government institutions. It's actually hard to believe this is a 300-person company. They hire top engineers, but also expect project managers. Only 30-40% of your time is spent on actual engineering. The rest is debating in Asana, filling templates, and wrangling feedback from people who won't be accountable for the work. Each checkpoint brings more opinions, more scope creep. You build a button, you ship a platform, but everyone "contributed", so nobody's responsible. The CEO and Product leaders weigh in on everything before shipping. Sounds like engaged leadership until it's mostly comments about animations and shades of orange. Projects get held at the door for weeks over things no user will notice. Meanwhile, actual product strategy questions sit unanswered. When something ships, a single Reddit comment can pull it back. Everything is bad for "optics." Leadership obsesses over pixels but won't defend the decisions they approve. Everyone has an opinion about everything. Every decision is a consensus. You'll ship polished work that nobody's proud of. You're senior talent, but you'll still need to prove every decision to a dozen people. I stay for pay and remote benefits. That's the honest answer most coworkers would give if they weren't afraid of being identified.