A culture of bullying pervades the Austin office. The turnover speaks for itself. In my tenure there, more than fifteen developers left, and others were fired. If you are a software engineer, run away! There are a few long term people here, much like Jean Paul Sartres play no exit, they are doomed to be here for eternity.
First of all, the code was horrendous. Management does not know what makes a good developer and there was no senior architect to stratify skill levels and define code styles. The problem was there were clear differences in understanding of best practices and coding styles, and management favored the opinions of coders based on social reasons and not merit. Much of the code was unusable procedural code, in a react project!
There was so much tech debt, things needed to be refactored, it slowed down processes immensely. Not only this, developers would get blamed for taking too long when they were fighting through layers of spaghetti code.
Scrum would be an overemphasis of points being met and burn down charts. However, these were never accurately conveying work being done because developers were discouraged from assigning accurate points. Developers were hounded and micro managed to make sure burndown charts were realized. In meetings, developers were often criticized and put down in an effort to motivate them to work harder, and longer hours. It was motivation by lecture and criticism.
There were also emotions not normally seen in meetings and inappropriate comments, blaming and pointing fingers, voices raised and subtle behavior that may be considered by some to be abusive, gaslighting, aggressive. During one meeting, the tone was so aggressive toward a suggestion to value quality over speed in code, that all people present in the meeting became visibly uncomfortable.
The pressure to meet the timeline caused many people emotional distress. Working overtime was strongly suggested in a meeting to make a deadline. Though it wasn’t explicitly stated that everyone was required to, management assumed without asking that people would commit to an overtime 10am-8pm day, which was assumed with a strong suggestion in a meeting.
Developers just weren’t treated well.
