REI reviews

They've had layoffs the last 2 years and have announced they plan on laying off an additional 50% of IT headcount to outsource to India/Colombia. This has unsurprisingly caused morale to be absolutely in the toilet and most people I know are actively looking for other jobs and are pretty checked out. We also keep losing really good engineers and managers. I expect when the dust has finally settled it's mostly going to b-tier managers, leads and architects babysitting the outsourced contractors. The whole outsourcing plan is also just another symptom of our terrible management at basically all levels of the co-op. Eric Artz is the least inspiring company leader I've ever heard and their grand plan to get back to profitability seems to just be to sell more full price Stanley cups. This pivot is after the previous vision which was to more than double our member count in less than 10 years which absolutely no one believed in, they never had any sort of real strategy on how this completely unachievable thing would happen or any sort of intermediary goals and now they're basically pretending none of this ever happened. The lack of competence is certainly not limited to the C-level. IT management doesn't understand technology, doesn't care about engineering culture, seems to think engineers are completely fungible and generally buys everything vendors tell them. There has been a ton of turnover in the last few years of management because they bloated their ranks during good times, had several bad hires, then had to layoff a bunch of management when the good times ended. Unfortunately the layoffs didn't seem to consider competence as a factor. We had a recent senior IT management hire that couldn't stumble through a coherent thought that only lasted a couple of years, yet somehow made it through a layoff. We also have a couple of empire building, ladder climbing middle managers that everyone hates working for that just loves chasing new shiny things based on whatever random blog post he recently read. For some reason IT management also thinks it's a great idea do a full lift and shift cloud migration (which is being thoroughly micromanaged) simultaneously while laying off half of the IT staff that would be doing the work and doing their best to encourage attrition of their best engineers.

1. Inconsistent expectations that made it difficult to navigate day to day and measure success, led to competing priorities and lack of cohesion to move work forward, constantly treading water. 2. Limited growth opportunities and unethical hiring practices. Promotions given to people who weren't even qualified for their current job, let alone the promotion. 3. Rampant favoritism, very cliquey. Borderline ableist with the preference they show employees who "fit the brand" (i.e. trail runners, backpackers, cyclists, etc.). 4. Slow moving to execute change, then don't stick with a decision long enough to reap the benefits. 5. Late to the game for DEI efforts, then tried to shove haphazard programming down employees throats, seemed to care more about telling the media about their efforts than creating a truly inclusive culture.