VERY chaotic work environment.
- People of all levels being hired without a place to put them, or hiring them for skills that they don't have. A rush to hire 'as many as possible' before the new year, and then having them sit around doing nothing come January.
- When interviewing, HR will consistently lowball you. Unless the person in charge of the team has really taken a liking to you, the base pay is below average.
- General lack of competence for the people managing devs and designers
- Managers more interested in making themselves personally look good than they are in their projects succeeding
- Specifically, I had a dev manager that offloaded his responsibilities to others, did not respect boundaries, regularly lied and justified it by saying our director agreed with him (this was never true), moved people between projects 1-3 times a week, and would call regular meetings to talk about himself. Even after countless complaints to our director and several conversations with HR for more serious issues, nothing was done.
- Vast amounts of untrained developers with little understanding of version control and no experience with testing, linting, or even reviewing code.
- Product designs changing every month or two, even though the product I was working on had been in development for years
- No one knew what features the product had to have, and no one agreed on most features. Again, after years of development
- Third party contracting companies that would only deliver minified code (!!), declare major tasks unimportant, attempt to rewrite contracts on the fly, attempt to sneak code into the codebase, consistently break things...
- Lack of internal infrastructure. I came into work one day and my teams Git repo had mysteriously lost the last month and a half of work. When I found the person in charge of the server it was on, they said they had no backups, couldn't find anything in the logs, and to 'let them know if it happened again'.
- When attempting to move to a different internal company repo, the team in charge of it sent us another teams onboarding doc and just did a Find-Replace of their name with ours. None of the URLs and credentials were correct, it took a week to get correct info and a bit over a month to get it working.
- Nonexistent work/life balance for the front end devs on a related project in our department. They would be on call on the weekends, and would set an alarm for every hour to check if anything had broken. One told me they had gotten 8 hours of sleep in the past 3 days, and another had bags under his eyes the entire time I was employed there.
Overall, a very stressful and demoralizing place to work. I left willingly because almost any other professional environment would be better than here.
This is all of course specific to the department and project I was on, but the general attitude of other developers was not much better.
