1. Severely dysfunctional team. This is the defining experience. Multiple rounds of sudden, poorly-communicated reorganizations and layoffs create a constant atmosphere of insecurity. Strategy seems to shift with the wind, often driven by internal politics rather than business needs.
2. A significant chunk of time is dedicated to producing high-level, shallow reports for upward management, rather than meaningful, actionable business insights, stunting technical and analytical growth.
3. Incompetent leadership. Leadership lacks basic data (or even statistical) knowledge. Mentorship is non-existent. You are thrown into complex projects without guidance and expected to manage cross-functional dependencies without authority.
4. Top-down management style. Due to their own lack of competence, leadership often project their own insecurities onto subordinates. People often get yelled at or get mistreated. To cover up for their incompetence, they constantly overwork this team but even so nothing goes smoothly. Projects are often underdelivered due to the lack of clear direction and communication. On top of that, leadership does not like disagreeing voices. People were told to ‘shut up’ for raising valid concerns. Only total compliance gets rewarded.
This is a textbook example of how not to run a data team. Having worked crossed multiple companies I swear I have never seen anything like this and probably will never see another team as chaotic as this one. I’m only speaking to my experience in the data analytics team under the operations department so it does not generalize to the entire company. And I’m certain that other teams do not function like this.
