There are problems in the company’s culture, however, often attributed to “growing pains” in the recent rapid growth of the company. Whether or not that is true, there are elements of toxicity within the environment at WorkWave and sometimes, one can see cracks in the perception of a happy “Best Place to Work” that is so well-maintained. If you peruse the reviews, you’ll find plenty of nondescript short-answer praises of the company that shadow out other reviews from people with complaints of a culture that felt exclusionary and limiting for one reason or another. Engineers leaving this company have pointed out problems with management and supportability of software among other things, but when good things are said, rarely ever is the internal communication or development process particularly praised. There is reason for that. The vision that is shared from the top is having a lot of trouble in its actual implementation, and instead of getting the opinions of the people who actually do the work on these features, developers get hit with “accelerated” deadlines and “aggressive” roadmaps by proxy through middle management. Integrating products sounds really cool from the top, but when that integration isn’t well-supported by smart software development decisions, it builds a house of cards.
Not only that, but there is also a culture within engineering that smells toxic, and I’ve experienced that element more and more as I remained at the company. I can’t speak to other departments, because I didn’t really work in them. As a concrete example of this, one day I was staying late to finish up some work on a feature that was lagging somewhat (something I don’t mind doing, but building a culture of this is obviously detrimental and another problem entirely of developer superiority complexes.) Most of the other engineers had left, and I saw a group of the “old timer” engineers displaying pictures of one of the newer engineers on a projector and deriding this person, making fun them and laughing at their expense. I didn’t report this, because I’m not the kind of person who wants to cause trouble and people were already talking crap about me for being on social media in the open office environment. I was so repulsed by this that I grabbed my stuff and left to keep working at home. That, combined with a culture that thinks it’s a good idea to report new hires to management for “taking too many breaks” or “being on social media” without knowing anything about how much an employee _actually does_ should be a major red flag to any prospective or existing employee here.
