Their leadership does not know how or is unwilling to:
- plan and define requirements for projects
- hire appropriate talent and form effective teams
- treat all employees with fairness and respect and enforce policies evenly
- communicate such that everyone knows what is expected of them
- create a work environment that is conducive to software development
- select appropriate technologies for a given project
As a result, you have chaos, wasted time and effort, lost productivity,
and general dissatisfaction among employees. The company provided
me with many "firsts" in my career, and none of them positive. I had
never seen people lose their composure during stand-up meetings
before. I had never been treated with disrespect and contempt before.
I had never lost a night's sleep over a project before. I had never left
the office with my hands shaking in frustration before. I had never seen
someone fired out of the blue without warning or discussion until working
here.
They frequently hire people for one thing and make them work on
something else that they are ill-suited for. I was hired as a Python dev,
but I spent over a year writing javascript. I frequently explained that I
am a backend engineer, that I have zero interest or expertise i
building user interfaces or front-ends, yet many of my projects involved
designing and building UIs. Other Python devs were disappointed to find
themselves inexplicably stuck hacking javascript or something else
completely unrelated to the job for which they were hired.
The office is cramped, loud and lit like a hospital operating room.
Almost everyone stares at backlit screens all day and the glare is
horrendous. Some people are allowed to work from home while others
are not. There are no generally applicable rules on this; it is
completely arbitrary.
Their technological decisions are based almost entirely on slick marketing
and personal religions and have little to do with technical merit or fitness
for a particular use case. Dissenting opinions are ignored or shouted down
with personal attacks and non-sequiturs.
In a disappointing yet unsurprising conclusion, my employment was
capped with a sloppily drafted, nonsensical and one-sided separation
agreement. The contract prohibited me from speaking critically of
the company under any circumstances, yet the company was free to
slander, badmouth or sue me without limitation. They stubbornly refused to
negotiate on any of their terms, so I did not sign it. On the bright side, it
enabled me to write an honest review and post it here.
