I used to work for flipkart as a developer. Like other big companies, flipkart is yet another big company. A have a few things to say :
- Gross over staffing. It's like they will hire devs for even moping the floor. If you got an offer for SDE I or SDE II at flipkart.. all you are going to do is oncall. That's it. Forget about the claims of building great things.. they might be doing it.. you wont be doing anything.
- Really bad management. They are particularly self-important and dismissive about anything wrong you say about flipkart. They take decisions in a frenzy and when something goes wrong they will point fingers. You just can not say to a manager that what he is saying is wrong. I did that once, his decision back fired, he asked me(my team) to explain why it happened, i replied saying that it happened because we told him that it will happen and he still did that. I was later asked to apologise for saying that it was his mistake. Go to hell.
- It is not a startup. It was not a startup even when I joined and I knew that. But many people in flipkart believe that it is a startup, when you tell them that a company with 400 engineers can not be a startup, they will say things like.. well we function like one. Bullshit.
- Arrogance. They really believe that they are the google of india(in terms of innovation). You can see the arrogance in internal mail conversations. You can witness that when you interview someone from flipkart. I have interviewed 6 devs from flipkart in last two months.. they are mostly incompetent for the salaries they get at flipkart.
- Favorism. The people working from a long time will be favored over you for any work. If you know an architect or a VP you can choose teams or modules you want work on.. otherwise.. "we have a strict policy. you need to perform well for two cycles.. blah blah". Perform at what? Sitting idle?
I don't really hate them. This is how things are at indian corporations. I think they could have become a great engineering company. But as I see it, its a downward spiral from now on.