Tech teams have a toxic culture of micromanagement and burnout - Anonymous employee VillageMD Employee Review

VillageMD's tech teams have a toxic culture of micromanagement and burnout that is enabled by Mike Roberts (the CIO/CTO). There are too many cases of projects being expertly designed and proposed by SMEs that are completely trashed by leadership and replaced by worse solutions in order for said leader to put their name on it. For instance an SME might propose a specific solution that solves for scaling since we have grown ten-fold in the last several years. However, if it wasn't designed by a leader, it must be poor quality. Heck, why do we even hire individual contributors at all? With all the bureaucracy pushed down by the incredible numbers of managers and above, there seem to be fewer of us than there are of them. Leaders are being promoted after, what I would consider to be, terrible track records. Things like running a department into the ground and having the majority of the folks quit (including entire teams) will likely earn you a promotion here at VillageMD. Or maybe you derail a scalable, automated solution to justify additional reports to do the work manually. The only plausible explanation that I can come up with, in at least some of these instances, is nepotism since a lot of our leaders seem to come to us in clusters from other companies. In all cases I would consider incompetence as it appears that many of the leaders here have failed upwards. And woe is you if you get on the bad side of one of the higher ups. There have been some very creative methods of approved, borderline retaliation by various leaders against folks they didn't like or agree with. Its unprofessional and, at times, incredibly immature. Folks are burning out left and right and, when they quit (because they are in droves), we are slow to even post the back-fill job let alone get someone in the door. At least on the tech teams, pay can vary wildly, even among folks with the same job title and comparable years of experience. (If you are currently employed at VillageMD, I encourage you to compare your salary to those around you) While this might not be directly supported by our illustrious (/s) CIO/CTO, he certainly enables it. Supposedly he reviews all of the exit interviews (he's made this claim). Which means he's read quite a few this year, but for whatever reason things aren't getting better. I don't understand or know why. Even after Talent did a full engagement survey in which a lot of these things came out. Finally, you should know that, without exception, I have given all of this feedback (and more) with specifics and details to various supervisors and folks up my chain of command during my time here at VillageMD. Things aren't improving. From my point of view they are getting worse. If our Talent team responds to this review, please note that actions, or lack thereof, speak louder than words.