You were grinding your Engineers into the ground and sold 3-6 months after I started. We were wondering why we were so overworked and then we knew, you were in the middle of the sale and probably just trying to get big names under the portfolio. This was at the HEIGHT of Covid no less so we already had that additional stress and nobody at Rancher cared about that at all. There wasn't a single email or meeting or anything giving people grace that I saw, telling them if they need time away to take it, etc, the entire company just acted like nothing was going on. Absolutely the opposite of the next company I went to.

I've only worked at one other company that comparatively treated their Engineers as badly and overworked as R. I started at the company with 3 other people on my team. None of them were there 1 year later, including myself. IIRC I quit after 6 months on the spot with no backup plan.

We were expected to make how-to videos, how-to articles, make labs, run labs w/public questions, give hour long tailored demos, 2-5 meetings with clients a day (potential and current) while also doing the actual technical work to deploy clusters, technical work testing various things (like Longhorn performance), complex cluster troubleshooting, all while having to keep on top of knowing everything about k8s and infra daily. Probably much more I don't remember right now. I worked SO many nights and weekends to keep caught up as did others.

I was so excited to work there as a k8s contrib getting to actually be paid to work on k8s and it was .... that. Thrown into a meat grinder with no room to breath. Every single day and week.