Crowe has a huge problem when it comes to software development, Partners. Partners care about their bottom line as they have to buy into the company and then get a share of the overall profits. Partners want more money so they hire straight out of college developers or overseas developers. College developers can be a good thing as they are new to software development and can be taught easily. Overseas developers with nine years of experience and only provide stack overflow answers are much harder.
Crowe puts a huge emphasis on the business side of development. Crowe is not an IT shop and doesn't empower developers. Developers don't even have admin rights on their machines. Developers are folded into the CPA mold and have to meet CPA credits per year. Business people hold all of the locks and keys too and for some products that includes technical direction. Technical direction is always, "What can we do to get this feature done as quickly as possible?" This sentiment is a big concern to a lot of developers, feature feature feature. Because business people have more day to day interactions with Partners they want to get more sales and that means more features. Sometimes we have features that aren't complete and developers might have to pivot or get a huge feature change set and are told to make it work. Developers are not given time to come back and correct because that wouldn't generate money.
BU leaders made empty promises about promotion and never followed through. Even if you do get a promotion the extra responsibilities doesn't equate to extra pay until the next merit increase cycle. Promotions at Crowe are troublesome. You get more responsibility but you are expected to do everything you were doing before your promotion. So you could be an architect and be expected to sit in discovery meetings all day, troubleshoot production, story work and help out others. This level at Crowe, "Manager," has very high turnover because no one can get anything done. Crowe is trying to make changes to the title structure but its just putting lipstick on a pig.
Lastly, the new CEO, Mark Baer, eliminated firm wide bonuses. The new program is a spot bonus program. Different business units have been trying out various methods to give out spot bonuses. Our division gave 25 dollar tango gift cards for our stellar year. In addition, there is a program in the works to reward feature work. This is a horrible idea and will cause developers to code as fast as possible to meet deadlines but will have bugged and poorly maintained code. This also removes the ability to make a solution better because that will be frowned upon for it doesn't give out bonuses.
