Not too long ago, when the company first started, it was supposed to be more engineer focused, and more Agile than Allstate. More of the Pivotal way. However the company has slowly been moving away from the Pivotal way of software development.
Cross team rotations are becoming less and less frequent. Most engineers stay on projects for at least half a year, up until they are completely worn out on their project.
Learn day used to be a big benefit to working at the company. Was a reason why I joined. Management has slowly been taking away that benefit. It got to a point where almost none of the engineers do learn day anymore because of pressure from management and project managers to not do it and focus on project work.
Engineers could request to attend conferences that are relevant to their work. However, management places a lot of requirements for attending such as doing a lunch presentations or forcing people to recruit if Arity has a presence at the conference. These are requirements for engineers but management and people outside engineering attend conferences and don't have the same expectations even if it is the same conferences that engineers attend.
There is a lot of favoritism happening at the company. Being nice to management gets you good reviews and lets you get away with a lot of things, but if someone voices their opinion on management or a product then they are at risk of bad reviews or even being moved to another team. Feedback is only one way between managers and engineers.
The org structure is not flat at all. Many levels. Which makes things difficult when wanting to give feedback to management. If someone wants to talk to higher management, then they would be redirected to talk to their immediate manager.
Micromanagement is plentiful here at the company. Engineers have a long list of requirements that the managers expect from them. Management is trying to implement daily pair feedback that is sent to the managers and not to the engineer that is supposed to get the feedback.
Upper management can at times be too involved with how engineers want to build software. They will tend to force us to use technologies which might be overkill to what is actually needed. There are important meetings that all engineers are required to attend however the people in upper management are nowhere to be seen during these meetings. Engineers have no sort of freedom or say at this company.
The company does a poor job of allocating engineering resources. There are teams that have too many engineers needed for the work that is needed while there are teams that don't have enough. There are even teams that don't have full time project managers or designers to help with the engineers. The products that are actually successful and are making money get little attention. While products that seem to have little potential and aren't making money get much more attention and resources.
The morale is low among the engineers. The retention rate at the company is low. Engineers are leaving and some others are looking at other companies. This is not surprising since a person in upper management told all engineers to leave if they don't want to be here at the company. Goes to show how little upper management cares about fixing the problems. They would even go as far as creating an obvious fake 5 star Glassdoor review to make the company seem a little more appealing.
