It’s a high-pressure environment where I had very little control over my own success.
As an example, I once had a service account setup request take 2 weeks, then get locked because it was setup incorrectly and had to start the process over. All the while, I had a director pestering me about deploying to production and not understanding that—without the service account—it wouldn’t work anyway.
I eventually had the pleasure of working with a fantastic TPM who knew who to sweet-talk to get such things unstuck, but he moved on and things ground to a halt again.
This problem is widespread across the company with no signs of improvement and lately has gotten worse as turnover increased and teams I depend on are increasingly backlogged.
The Byzantine bureaucracy could be humorous if it wasn’t combined with surreal deadlines that management imposes. For a large project my team carefully sized the features to provide an estimate. When our manager presented it to his bosses he was scolded because it wasn’t ambitious enough. We were later told, without any consultation, that we would have one third the time estimated to complete the project.
This was not an isolated incident. Coming up the elevator a little before 9 one morning, a coworker looked positively haggard and confided that he’d only left the office at 3am to get a little sleep and shower but had to come back in to try to meet a similarly absurd deadline.
Deadlines like that are stressful enough, but when every team depends on other teams to get things done and all those teams are under extreme time pressure for their own projects, there’s very little the engineers can do to get ourselves unblocked and keep our projects on track. It’s stressful and crazy-making.
As you can imagine, morale in engineering is quite poor. It has been since I first joined, but it was causally hand waved by management for the first year and a half as a temporary symptom of the company changing for the better.
Something must’ve happened a month ago because suddenly the CTO acknowledged it and promised focus groups to start addressing it. Now, a month later, no such focus groups have been scheduled and there’s no sign of improvement in sight.
Again, I have no visibility into management, but it’s become obvious that they’re not able to improve the problems that are driving employees away.
