1. Bonuses are determined by goals primarily affected by non-engineering departments, e.g. Biz Dev, Sales, Customer Support. When they fail and bonus targets are not met, no accountability is held but engineers are punished despite a whole year's worth of work.
2. There's no real accountability held for management at the top, even if poor decisions are made (e.g. deciding to partner with an OEM that significantly hinders BrainCorp). There's no visibility as to what the C suite is even doing to help the rest of the company.
3. There's a running joke that quarterly planning gets scrapped the first week within a quarter, despite hundreds of collective man-hours being spent, but it's true and an indictment of upper management not being held accountable for this constant misstepping. It's frankly a waste of time if new efforts and upset plans on a whim.
4. Pay is not at all competitive despite the workload and resource contention. It's pure luck that BrainCorp retains the talent it has.
5. The company is shockingly obscure when it comes to promoting an engineer from senior to staff. There is no clearly stated set of requirements to become staff.
6. BrainCorp can't help but constantly commit to engineering efforts before Product can get their act together and actually determine final requirements. This has been persistent for years to the point of questioning what Product even does.
7. BrainCorp has fumbled multiple demos and pilots because of misunderstandings from what a customer wants. Never is there an autopsy with explicit action items provided for the next time.
8. QA leadership is very reactive and not proactive in the software development cycle.
9. Even after an IPO, the stock won't be worth that much, given that BrainCorp could be at best a retail analytics company.
