Ugh, where to start. First of all, I would never work here again, and would strongly urge you to avoid them. This is not a tech company, nor does it have good tech culture. It's a typical blue-collar company--with the mediocre benefits to match--run by C-suite executives that employ disposable resources they can acquire and dump as needed, including tech workers hungry for that remote job. A lot of the people here have worked for the company for many years, since it's one of the few large employers in the area, and I suspect are afraid to make waves to improve things.
- Lost my job abruptly with no warning as part of the June 2024 layoffs and larger cost savings effort (Google it), along with 42 other tech folks in the EDS department. Got invited to a last-minute meeting after standup, and that was that. No opportunity to say goodbye to anyone, make any notes, or even commit some in-flight work I had. I frantically exported a list of ADO tickets I worked on so that I had some record of accomplishments. Got a lousy two-week severance, with no PTO payout (I had 3 weeks banked). This is after the larger layoffs that affected the Driveway side of things in Fall 2023 after that product went live.
- Onboarding was a mess. I couldn't even log into my laptop initially, had to connect with folks through my personal email so I could get the phone number for help desk and resolve it, which took half the day. My manager had my first week off, so couldn't connect with him. I was never really introduced to the team and there were no real greetings, just a new resource to do work. I couldn't actually do anything on the laptop for a week because you don't have admin access to it, which meant repeated, long phone calls with help desk to get them to install stuff, but only approved software. Hello, software developer here, I need to install tools to do my job, and I have specific tools I'm effective with.
- As part of your annual review, you have to demonstrate, among the other values, how you are living the "fun" core value as part of your day-to-day work. As a result, the team had awkward weekly web-based gaming sessions like Scribble.io or Codenames, which was our "fun". Having fun at work is a product of the culture and people, it can't be forced, nor should it be a value. Get real.
- Despite working there over a year, I never really got to know any of my coworkers and never felt connected to the team. This ties in with the above "fun" point, in that this is a product of the culture. People were generally friendly, but conversations never went beyond basic congenialities. On my team in EDS, the other developers were super quiet, even during important meetings like backlog refinement. As an outsider that came into this team, it was incredibly awkward, and all the time I found myself trying to find something to say to break the silence, which was draining. This was probably not helped by the fact that more than half the team were people who did not speak English natively, and there was likely some culture clash. I also suspected that several of the contract team members were actually working seconds jobs, since they would routinely go silent in meetings and fail to answer when called on and would also not respond to Teams messages for hours.
- I thought I was doing an excellent job and was told this repeatedly by my manager until the frequency of one-on-ones with him started falling off. Then it was time for my annual review and low and behold, senior management thought I "needed improvement" because I wasn't visible enough. This is despite all the projects and work I completed above and beyond, and the extra time I put in in the process. It was a real gut punch and a complete shock. Why would I need to be visible to senior managers? I don't even work with them. My manager should be advocating to them on my behalf, that's his job.
- Speaking of managers: There are too many. Software Engineering Managers, Senior Software Engineering Managers, Directors, Senior Directors. How about laying off those people, rather than the people that actually do the work?
- Arbitrary, inflexible, company-imposed calendar deadlines drive product development which introduces a ton of churn and pivoting (if only I had a dollar for every time I heard the word "pivot" here). In the real tech world, the team determines the delivery date (to the quarter, not a calendar date) based on tee shirt sized estimates of the planned work, and the delivery date generally gets adjusted as more work is discovered. Constant carry over each sprint, yet the team would still shoehorn as much work in as possible, encouraged by our team lead and manager. Rinse and repeat.
- Directors and senior managers trying to be developers. Sorry to break it to you, but your coding days are over. Learn to delegate and support your employees instead.
- Benefits and pay are mediocre. They offered me 5k under my stated range, knowing that I would try and negotiate up, but they wouldn't go any higher than the minimum. Why not just make a decent offer instead of doing the predetermined salary negotiation song and dance? Two weeks of PTO is standard (many companies are offering double that now). During hiring I was able to negotiate up to three but not more, and there are a minimum of company-paid holidays. 401k match is a paltry $2500 flat (yes, you read that correctly), with a lengthy vesting period.
- Awful performance-sapping applications installed on laptops: ZScaler proxy that breaks network things and Thycotic Privilege Manager with a memory leak that would gradually consume multiple gigs of RAM on the already strapped machine. Fortunately, I was able to keep an administrative PowerShell window open and would routinely restart the service to free up the RAM.
- Regular phone calls with their help desk, who speak broken English, unless you're lucky enough to connect to tier 2. Since you don't have admin access to your laptop, expect this to happen a lot as a developer. Last I heard they weren't installing Thycotic anymore, so good luck with that.
- I could go on but am stopping here.
