Where do I start?
AMCS pretends to be a one software platform for the waste management industry. In reality, it has aggressively acquired a slew of companies and inherited a number of unrelated software stacks, all very old, with no interconnection between them. The customers are puzzled “why if I use a system A and a system B and they both owned by AMCS, my data does not flow between them."
The culture is an enterprise top-down, where the engineering and architecture leads in name but bureaucrats in reality are extremely defensive in their technology choice, stifling the grass-root innovation: they want to control everything, but are very slow to respond to any genuine request. Post a proposal to use something that was proven for 15 years or so elsewhere, wait months, chase it, only to get denied and defeated in the end.
The performance and KPIs are a joke. You may wonder why every quarter needs a different performance goal if the role is essentially the same. Add micromanagement: for software developers in some teams it is “N code commits a day”, which is a nonsense.
The Head of People is a black hole: they never respond, which speaks for itself.
Heavy outsourcing to a few cheaper places: everyone sees the writing on the wall. Quantity, not quality. The attitude is to acquire a company, make everyone go and a few people staying out of love for the industry squeezed to keep the lights on, only to be replaced in the long run by faceless workers offshore who out of the happiness of simply having a job would swallow anything and never complain.
