I was hired as a remote employee, living out of state. The laptop I was shipped did not have permissions that would allow me to install or configure any settings on it, and no one who remoted in was able to fix it. Not the worst thing, but the fact that I was left unable to perform my job for a MONTH is what really set it apart. I constantly brought up the need to my team, my boss, and IT/helpdesk, and after a month they finally figured out I needed to be shipped a new laptop. During my time there the company pushed out several different security products and updates that did everything from removing permissions, slowing down computers till they were almost unusable, to bricking a senior software manager's laptop. It was as if they never tested anything. The permissions limitations where so bad more than a few engineers quit over them, and people on our team said he was hesitant to recommend the company, or even take part in interviews without warning people about the ongoing permission problems.
Despite using private Azure Devops agents that basically served as containers, the automation leadership still included Docker in CI, with the explanation that it was easier than installing dependencies directly on the machines. What they never included was instructions or training on how to properly setup Docker, causing CI collisions due to same named containers, a problem that plagued automation for a year before finally installing the dependencies. Nothing was built to scale. The QA leadership also allowed Azured Devops to serve as our CI tool, despite it's lack of reporting support for Karate, the framework chosen for API testing. It seems that no one in the company ever bothered to ask if a SW choice was really best, or just the latest. As a result, there were numerous problems throughout the SDLC due to choosing tools the company was not mature enough to use, or did not work well with other selected technologies.
The quality was so poor that our team routinely spent entire months shipping no new features due to production outages. And this was not isolated to just our team. It was clear that pushing out new features was the priority, not properly testing them, and never cleaning up tech debt. The team also had no concept of what the purpose of a sprint was. Tickets were routinely closed as completed when the work was never released in order to make the points look good. Features would linger for months, making releases unstable, and dangerous because whether it ever released or not, it was merged to master. The scrum masters job at the company seemed to be enabling the teams bad habits, the opposite of what what the role should do.
In a little over a year I transitioned between four different bosses. The company had to shutter an entire division due to Medicare payout changes. But they also laid off a large number of people outside the division, seemingly in order to boost the stock price, as without the sale to CVS, they would have likely gone under. And this is a company that had just IPO'd a year and half prior. It was clear the issues I saw were systemic, and came from the C-level. Blame and problems always rolled downhill. Management made decisions without consulting their employees. Issues were constantly raised, but no one in leadership listened, or had the power to act.
Leadership was extremely change resistant, despite seeming to embrace the latest and greatest. Employees were routinely discriminated against, and let go for pushing for adoption of industry best practices, or suggesting the current methods were not the best way to do things.
Other corporate issues: I was paid late in violation of California state law twice, a practice so common(paying employees late) the HR slack channel was riddled with examples. Also, at the end of 2022, social security was not withheld from anyone's paycheck for two months. And finally, right before I left, someone asked me about forcing an evaluation through the system that was out of date, and needed to be re-done. I mentioned the only way to process that evaluation would be to change the evaluation date, but doing so would constitute Medicare fraud. I never heard from the person after that.
