Pros
The 401k with great matching. The gym at HQ was amazing.
Cons
The healthcare was awful, had to spend $1500 for a health care process that was taken care under HMO previously. Management, this will depend in which group you are in, on my side not such a great manager. Manager turned down my request for training in SpringOne but other software engineers from other groups were attending. I requested training for Kubernetes for a period of one year and manager again was no help. Manager decided to move group internal React training from early in the week to Friday at 4 PM CT, this means it was 5 PM ET and 2 PM PT, this manager lacked proper management skills! Excessive dependence on contractors in the group which was composed of 75% contractors and many from the same eastern nation (figure it out). Other groups had a similar makeup as well. I felt left out many times as these contractors spoke in their own language about technical items during technical meetings ( this may be an ideology?). There were managers who wanted to hire more contractors to give them the design of the architecture. When I joined the second group at Discover, the contractors were running the show. I brought up the many, many, many technical architecture issues to the manager that the contractors had designed but again dismissed by the manager as manager was happy with the velocity provided by contractors; however, all the issues that I brought up were manifested when the onshore offshore leads left the group. I am really not sure how contractors tested as their test cases were also awful!! Very big technical debt as the contractors did not document anything ( I guess they wanted to keep 'whatever' technical knowledge to themselves?). They were designing as they were learning so plenty of space to commit many errors. Manager stated that we could not communicate with any contractors but only the onshore offshore leads, I thought that this was such an absurd process so I changed that but manager was not very welcoming of this initially until the onshore offshore leads left. Manager with no vision. Current loan application had sequential related HTML pages and were created in FreeMarker. FreeMarker pages were being migrated to React. Manager stated that any FreeMarker to React page available should be deployed to production. I stated that this cannot be done until all pages are successfully migrated to React because this would present a better UX to the user. I also mentioned that Discover needs to learn how to properly execute branding of their services. And they listened to me but this may have been presented by the manager as a manager idea so I did not get any credit. I am not sure why the manager would create a meeting to have the engineer teach the manager how architect a microservice. Manager should have that skill. Manager stated to me that I should be a manager because of the work and knowledge that I have. I was welcoming of that but not sure when that would happen. But then Disappointment, I was demoted because of that silly Amir Arooni Dreyfus model to fix the many technical issues at Discover (this person was lost and like I stated, 'The tin man had more personality'). I was demoted from a Lead SW Engineer to an Associate Sr Engineer. I complained about this to my manager and my manager gave me subjective response 'maybe you just do not belong in our group'. This demotion implied that I would no longer qualify to be promoted to be manager, I had to climb back up to be a lead again. My co-workers were not informed of my demotion nor did I mention what the manager had stated to me. The funny part, manager went back to his previous group to hire a manager. Well, I found myself teaching this manager how to be a manager in our group. Another factor, a co-worker had passed away from the excessive work in this second group, maybe it was because of the poor architecture that was created. I do remember my co-worker as I went through a similar health issue from working too hard.
