It all probably depends on your area and who you report up to but in my experience: Lack of career advancement for individual contributors (unless they have an opening/position they need to fill or they’ll lose it). Seems to only be career advancement at the management level, so probably a pro if you’re looking for a manager role. Seems to be more managers than individual contributors. There’s an unspoken rule that you need to be on call and available 24/7. No standard processes. No sincere recognition for anything positive. Felt like I was getting fed to the wolves a majority of the time. Management never takes any responsibility for anything even slightly negative, and will pin it on anyone who they can even if it’s their own people. Everyone is just looking out for themselves, so it makes it a hard environment to collaborate in. Spent a lot of time on extra “side” projects/work that amounted to nothing (advancement wise). You’re expected to do many things far beyond your role description and will most likely not get any reward/recognition/promotion if you do it. There are many of the same meetings with the same content and managers refuse to consolidate them. They always talk about the great culture, but i never saw anything that equated to a great culture. A lot of the dev teams seemed burnt out and the quality of their work/caring seemed to be correlated with that. You’re frequently asked to “bring new ideas” and when you present your ideas to management mostly everything will be shut down, which leads people to stop trying because it’ll probably get shut down anyway. A lot of key players were quitting and manager’s response to ease concerns was “yeah, well, people quit.” Not an ounce of trying to make the remaining members feel remotely better by even just a tiny bit of encouragement. There is a strong mentality of “your best is not good enough ”. They refuse to allow people to be fully remote and you will be required to come into the office on a schedule solely for the reason to be a warm body in a seat. Also probably because they spent a ton of money on renovations during COVID and they don’t want to acknowledge or accept that it probably wasn’t the most critical thing to spend money on. I developed depression and anxiety from this job. I could probably keep going on but overall, pretty toxic environment and a lot of gaslighting.
