CarMax Software Developer reviews

- honestly not a very exciting place to work, I don’t find the work very challenging… - benefits are so mediocre. There is supposed unlimited PTO, and I get harassed by my managers for taking PTO anyways. My healthcare plan is far inferior to my previous workplaces. The 6% 401k match is good. - no real motivation to innovate, it was simply a response to the threat of Carvana. Now that carvana stock is down, they aren’t motivated to “digitally transform” anymore and they have discreetly put the brakes on innovation efforts - promotion process is vague and there is no sense of control over your career path. Feedback is rarely solicited from your peers who are actually working in the weeds with you. and the policy on capabilities that are necessary to get promoted are so vague and they might as well not exist. and there’s so much inconsistency when they decide someone is “ready to be promoted” - any questions regarding pay are answered with vague noncommittal answers, and then thrown to the wind. Have yet to see any real response or changes related to those questions - quarter after quarter, my group of teams has given the low scores in our engagement surveys to the Diversity and Inclusion category. The manager says she’ll pass the feedback up, and then that’s the end of it. Nothing happens after these surveys. And they are so behind on D&I efforts. I couldn’t believe it but they are just now starting ERGs within CarMax. Seriously for a company this large, what took them so long???? - not every manager is bad, but I have had a significant number of managers / lead devs who have honestly used scary manipulative tactics against me to harass/intimidate me for things like taking a day off. It’s almost mind boggling to me because I have worked in a much more safe and kind workplace. What is truly sad is that I don’t think they even realize that their tactics are unusual, they’re just used to it. It makes me scared to know how the culture must have been so much worse than this before the technology transformation effort began - They say they’re not tracking your time, but they have revealed to me that they track what yours you work by monitoring the calls you make to Splunk or Azure services with your employee ID. and trust me, they are regularly checking as a practice - clearly an anti-union focus amongst management. We are made to watch training videos with almost blatant anti-union undertones, and everyone is encouraged to bring all complaints to managers and “something could be done” but those complaints don’t ever get addressed - gives weird brainwashed cult vibes. people at carmax have a weirdly inflated view of what we do… it’s used car sales but they act like we’re changing the world somehow. And people do weird things like wildly clap for the CEO during all hands like he’s a pop star. One time he handed someone a signed photo of himself as a reward for winning an employee of the quarter award

- Promotion progress is entirely arbitrary and based on very vague rubrics and guidelines that could easily apply to anyone or not apply depending on your subjective reading of them - Heavy emphasis on reaching broad business goals that you don't necessarily have control or even influence over - Management is fundamentally disconnected from the day-to-day by design, which leads to a disconnect on their awareness of what's going on - Performance reviews feel like they are based on surface-level perception rather than reality