Great staff, zero leadership, worst mistake I ever made
Pros
Parts discount is great, starts on day one Remote work Worked with some really talented and nice people in IT
Cons
Where do I begin? After each statement append "remember its retail" The general corporate culture is micro management Exec leadership forgets without IT they would not have a company so they nickel and dime everything to death which gives you a tech stack that is horribly outdated and tons of organically built, kludgy code, with the belief there is no problem. Pay is 15-20 percent under current market wages Benefits are not very good and expensive Tech stack is outdated and kludged together. Think if Ikea created software. I have nothing against open source, the problem is if you go that route you have to have a firm grasp of direction and hire talented, skilled people. They fail on both. Most all of the code is a kludge or was written as mediocre 10-15 years ago standards. Salary employees have to give 30 days notice to keep/use your time off. Who does that? The company caters to the LCD employee, in a retail operation that's pretty low. Now contrast that with someone with a technical education (IT staff), feels like you are in high school all over again. Completely incompetent employees are retained, so that sets the morale very low among those who produce and try to solve problems. To be perfectly honest, the group I was in was the most hostile angry group of employees I had ever met in a professional setting. In the two years I was there, I learned why. Including my departure there were 4 employees that left the company in a group of approximately 10 (%40 turnover for you non-math majors). If that doesn't speak volumes, nothing does. There was no leadership, if you point out the obvious, the response is for you to come up with a solution to solve it. Basically do the job of leadership without getting paid, it was beyond pathetic. This bred the behavior of don't speak up because nothing will change unless you change it and you won't get any support if you try. In fact you will become despised for rocking the boat. One last item, this makes me chuckle still. The CEO kept talking about the O'Reilly "secret sauce". If you are referring to getting overworked and underpaid, that would be it. Fortunately not much is expected so mediocrity is the standard and stagnation is the rule.
