Started mediocre, and went downhill quickly - Software Engineer Walgreens Employee Review

1.0
Dec 2, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You can "get away" with doing the bare minimum, no need to be motivated and easy to get hired. Can pay well based on your people skills, not developer skills. There are some good people there, but I imagine they will be jumping ship soon. Almost always a happy hour on Friday, or "Power pint" mid week. Not difficult to "be a rock star", just prepare to not be rewarded for it.

Cons

The worst bureaucracy I've seen. Many of the directors and above were promoted internally based on tenure rather than competency, resulting in many illogical decisions often based on emotion rather than data. Many technical decisions are made by non-technical people. When Walgreens took over, they cut the bonus to less than half of previous and replaced the benefits package; health coverage here is terrible. Because of the project structure, it can take forever to get bugs fixed (even serious ones), because there may be no team actively working on that area. Their code base has barely changed since 2001, and is a mess of spaghetti-c++ called marshaled from C# that was converted from vbscript via a tool; people are scared to touch it and implement delicate workarounds to avoid fixing core problems. The head of IT from Walgreens, now responsible for IT at drugstore is good friends with the CEO of Cognizant (CTS) contracting company, They are pushing to have the "brain trust" in the building, but have all work done overseas. (Many people are pushing back against this, but it still seems to be swinging that way).

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5.0
Apr 13, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

It was fun to talk to ppl

Cons

It was a little too dangerous

2.0
May 31, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

pay was decent I guess

Cons

no promotions, no good management, a lot of people in positions that do absolutely nothing, very cliquey, constant checking in 1:1's, no growth in your career, favoritism, toxic environment.

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