- Lack of management. The senior developers at the Development Center are great developers, but none of them are willing or capable of managing. Developers are assigned tasks and can get help working them, but that's the extent of their involvement. There are no clear expectations or feedback. There's a salary adjustment every year, but we aren't given a performance evaluation or any feedback about how we can improve as developers.
- Inconsistent work effort among developers. The 10x developer may be a myth, but 1/10x developer is not. There a few developers who take liberty with management's lack of expectations and produce far less than they are likely capable of. It's discouraging knowing your coworker is being compensated similarly to you while devoting a significant amount of their time browsing Facebook or texting on their phone instead of getting (more) tasks to work on.
- Poor mentoring. Brown-bag lunches and code reviews are encouraged on site to build developer knowledge and ensure code quality. None of that is done at the Development Center. All that seems to matter is getting your tasks done.
- Poor onboarding process. New hires are lucky to get taken out to lunch by a few developers. It's rare to be even introduced to the full team.
- No team-building. All of the events are focused around new hire orientation and only a few developers end up attending. There's been one team lunch for the development team in the past few years.
- Unclear policies. Dress code is supposed to be business casual, but some developers wear t-shirts and tennis shoes. Some employees leave at 4 pm while others are told they can't.