The first year and a half was great. Software management allowed us to explore and solve problems. They listened to suggestions on design and architecture.
At least 3 members of senior management were either asked to leave or left voluntarily in the last few months. The replacement management was not as welcoming to work with.
- They did not listen to advice. Many times before I left, I asked/suggested about holding a design meeting with the team to discuss our current implementation difficulties, our future requirements and how we might design/modify the existing architecture to meet the new challenges. I was told that was a waste of time. Management's plan was eventually unveiled to rewrite the existing backend architecture as a Node JS backed javascript solution. Again, I asked/suggested/begged to hold a design meeting so that we could get buy-in from the team and talk about why we were throwing away two years worth of work on a backend system that was fully functional/well tested/well maintained/well understood with a new rewrite. This never happened.
- Management does not understand technology. After the new management came on board, I gave a quick 30 minute overview of a single piece of the system. We were interrupted before I could cover most of the topic. I assumed we would pick up the conversation later. We never did. I tried to initiate it again and was rebuffed. Throughout other conversations regarding the state of the current system, management would frequently zone out and almost fall asleep. Simple architectural decisions or design decisions had to be explained many times before they would understand.
- Managers went behind people's backs, withheld information, played favorites, and held grudges. Several times, they would ask one person a question, dislike the answer, then go ask someone else until they got the answer they liked. They would sow misinformation, telling one person one thing, and another person something completely different. Then they would get frustrated and angry when they found out that we were talking to each other to try and figure out what was going on. During our weekly one-on-one meetings managers would talk around topics, never fully answering questions, never fully committing to any answer they gave. It was very apparent when you were in their favor or had fallen from grace. And if you did not fully agree with their plans and ideas, it was very clear that you had fallen from grace.
As a company, they are having a hard time getting any traction in the marketplace and the direction of the product was constantly changing. Instead of working to improve the system as a whole, we were mostly focused on small updates that customer-of-the-week absolutely needed right now. The types of things we were doing was adding very little value to the product. Communication between uppers and us was very sparse, and we never really knew how the company was doing as a whole.
