- The code base and infrastructure is sorely lacking. Most code was hurriedly written by the CEO and fails to incorporate much of the standard technologies in place for things like ORM, Dependency Injection, etc. The databases are poorly designed and there's a huge lack of engineering support for the business intelligence / data teams.
- Lack of documentation, in both the code and in a wiki. When I first arrived, there was no documentation for new hires. I had to write my own documentation so future engineers wouldn't be so lost!
- I met a couple senior engineers here who made it very apparent they had no interest in helping me succeed. Simple questions were met with three word answers and an aloof expression. Fortunately, most people were not like that and I had no trouble making a couple friends :)
- I have almost ten years of experience in building successful software and even leading teams. However I was brought on as a non-senior engineer (why?). More importantly, many of my ideas and suggestions for improvement were met with resistance, scrutiny, and distrust (which, truthfully, got better over time). I found some people simply had no interest in changing the status quo, or had their own ideas about how to do things and simply were uninterested in alternative viewpoints. The takeaway is that regardless of your experience, you'll need to prove yourself to be listened to at Clearslide: I concede that whether or not this is a negative thing is debatable.
- The sprint planning and QA flow needs to be reworked. We spent countless hours trying to plan a week and half of work, so QA could spend an entire week testing it. QA seemed overly involved with the whole process, and there needs to be a buffer between QA and Dev to prioritize bugs so Dev isn't constantly switching gears to address small or trivial issues.
