Low compensation and bonuses, taking pay cuts year over year because compensation isn't keeping up with inflation. They pretend to make up for it with bonuses, but those are small, too. Since even the bonuses are calculated on base pay, the low pay raises still negatively impact your income forever. Low morale. Good team leads get overlooked and the excuse given is they have poor "soft" skills even though they're mentoring and working hard to teach and get the team to follow coding standards. Poor team leads get a lot of coding done, so they're promoted and publicly stroked, even though they're not doing anything to support their mentees. People are afraid to ask their team leads for help so go outside the team for support. Disorganized. Priorities are constantly shifting. They’ll deprioritize things you’re working on and have you start working on something else, then you get dinged on your reviews for not completing the deprioritized work. New things get prioritized higher, and they want that done yesterday, so that shows up on your review, too, because it wasn't done before they asked for it. You also get blamed for finishing things that were deprioritized after they were completed. Nothing you work on is ever the right thing to have worked on. For a hardware company, there are a lot of issues with tools and equipment. You get issued an old laptop when you start and are expected to make it work for years. When you're finally eligible for an update, they replace it with the same model you started with. The laptop I'm expected to use for development is closing in on 10 years old. PTO was a pro until now, since they're switching to an "unlimited" PTO model for 2023. PTO will be subject to your manager's approval, which will be based on "business need" and "performance," so instead of earning your vacation and knowing its value and being able to plan accordingly, you have beg for permission knowing the team's scapegoats will be working unremittingly to subsidize the golden children. See above under disorganization: there's a real risk of losing your time off benefits if your projects get deprioritized.
