Legacy code all over. A few minor projects might be cool, but the main projects are untouchable: if you ever dream of proposing refactorings, forget about it. Working code must never be changed. And code quality is incredibly low, probably also because the average senior developers usually have no more than 5 years experience.
Testing: mirroring the code quality. You have this "regressions" (which is just a bad name for some end to end tests) written in this awful custom scripting language, pretty impossible to understand unless you've worked here for more than one year. Unit testing is almost impossible: some brave hearts have tried, there is a framework available, but the components are too tighted, and badly written (huge classes with lots of static, enormous private methods), scenario setup is too difficult, so I gave up one or two weeks after I tried. And since you can't even refactor, it's useless.
Development tools: extremely painful. You can only work on remote linux machines via ssh. You can't compile and edit code locally, you can't have an IDE (I've tried using it with a remote filesystem share, but it's too slow), and building in those remote machines really takes a huge amount of time.
Learning curve is way too steep. People here talk their own language, they use acronyms for everything. There are a few trainings available, from time to time, but it's far from sufficient: the projects are too big, too badly written, and nobody really explains you anything. Coworkers are usually friendly enough to answer every question you ask, but to be able to work on your own you'd really need someone to stick in pair with you for months.
Too much bureaucracy: you spend a huge amount of time tracking records and filling forms. And nobody explains anything in advance: some day you just discover that you have to do this or that procedure, or maybe that you even had been named as "load responsible for the week" (they use to call it sheriff), and you haven't the faintest idea of what you're even supposed to do.
Finally, nobody really checks what are you up too, so many people simply slack in here. Developers have no challenging objectives, so everything is just "live and let live".
