1 - Hiring a lot of people (especially in engineering) with no plan or support within teams. SB recently introduced a 3-week training to new starters to take them through current applications, culture and so on, but there is absolutely no thought going in to how to onboard these people in teams. Who trains them? How to make time for them when we have deadlines? It is like "Here is more people....onboard." It gets really stressful.
2 - Really bad space planning. They are growing really fast but every time we move office, it seems like we only plan for extra 60 people. You want to find a meeting room, or a quite space or even sometimes a space with your team? Good luck. It can cause a lot of stress. And also the office has these massive windows that are blocked my 'big screens' for team meetings & working under synthetic light all the time is annoying.
3 - There was an attempt to be remote friendly. Though not really. There is no remote culture even though we have remote working people. No thought put into sharing everything online, or arranging meetings. Remote people cannot hear anything most of the time, people continue to talk within themselves and so on. There needs to be a process. (FYI I am not remote.)
4 - Talking about processes, there is no process for most things. There is an ambition to get bigger & more clients, but absolutely no process or plan for this. Leadership team keeps changing people all the time - what is going on there? I stopped paying attention ages ago. We are supposed to be 'product teams', just because we have product managers in teams doesn't make us 'product'. It was just a bunch of project teams that were at the mercy of stakeholders. Don't even dare challenging a stakeholder as your career can depend on it. No process to deal with stakeholders, no process to define product, no process to onboard people IN teams, no process to work with other teams. Everything will collapse very soon.
5 - No trust to engineers. This one is my favourite because it is claimed that there is a lot of trust to engineers, not really though. They like to pretend we are autonomous product teams that are super agile but the truth is there is no 'fail fast' culture. It is 'do not fail, play safe and always use tools that you know - be waterfall' culture. Way to go.
6 - No value given to existing engineers. I heard this is same in most companies, but new hires are given market value salaries, where as existing engineers are being told they are getting the 'highest' of the band they are in where as it is so low for what their role is. There needs to be a consistency, and transparency. As a company trying to get bigger and relies on technology and engineers, they need to do much better.