Walmart Senior Software Engineering Manager II reviews

The upper management are technocrats who are unskilled in management and execution. As direct consequence, the director level management is busy doing turf wars and building empires. Forget promotion unless you are director's crony or willing to be his leutenant. The lower level managers are specifically hired to be spineless yesmen and that's exactly who they are. In other words, if you wanna join WalmartLabs, be a Director or Director's friend. There are very few A list technical players. Most serios developers stay away from the company and good for them. The interview process is very disorganized and mediocre. Mediocre people get hired. There are people (friends of directors of course) who do nothing but quote poetry and not get fired. In general, expectations are very low. But don't expect to be prompted even if you beat expectations 100 fold. For that, you need to be directors friend. Scrum process is sorta practiced but is a joke. Product Owners are very weak and report to the same manager, or even are the managers. Needless to say, this a huge non starter for the real scrum. Due to the inability of upper management to execute, coordination between teams is non existent. In fact, cross team interactions are solely politics driven. Unrealistic expectations given to teams to code, test (QA hardly exists), and support applications full time. If you wanna deploy complex infrastructure, it is pretty much your responsibility. Don't expect anybody from management to think about support capacity, or to think about anything at all. There is no perceptible culture and no fun. Yes, if you are lucky you can get a chance to work on challenging project, however don't expect it to be used due to mis execution at upper levels. So if your idea of job is fighting fires and being left without proper compensation, this is it.

Where to begin... There is a huge lack of accountability for the success of projects at all levels. Years of work can be thrown out because of poor planning and coordination between teams. The current breakdown of WebOperations, Services and Markets is failing miserably... Poor leadership and no clear vision has lead to teams working on products with no clear customers in mind. The success rate for any of the new "pangaea" projects is non-existent. It's definitely not a meritocracy society within Engineering... Your relationship with the executive team will determine how high you move up within the organization. Web Operations is a total mess... The failure of the business rests a great deal on their shoulders, with services following quickly behind. Contractors continue to fill empty seats - the employee to contractor ratio is incredible. If you work on any of the customer properties (Walmart.com, Sams.com)- write off your holidays - engineering is on call 100% and typically onsite. At some point Bentonville is going to look at what they are getting for their money and there will be a major reorganization...