- Complicated technical debt and bureaucracy. Amongst other blockers, you'll have work held up because of an antiquated CAB process. And forget about releasing directly to prod, or some slick and modern continuous deployment pipeline. Instead you will likely be releasing to a huge monolith. It might take a day or few for your release to reach the top of the queue, and then you better have a few hours free, even if the release goes well. Therefore, you may feel that you are not working as efficiently as you would like, and you will have many issues that you are trying to mentally balance. Overall, the mental over head can be exhausting, especially when you are required to support services in which you have no experience.
- Low pay rises that do not really reflect the skill level required.
- A stressful annual review process that is a really a restructuring tool. You will spend more time preparing for the annual review that you did applying for the job. And, you'll be competing against your work mates to keep your job. I would rather make cool new features instead of spending literally days justifying my existence in the company.
- It is also much more common now for teams to be torn apart or redeployed. It feels like job security is low, and so is psychological safety.
- Remote workers are less likely to be invited to visit their home office through the year (could be a plus for some people!). But this means less team connection.
- Senior manager positions are moving more and more to the US, leaving the main workforce in Australasia. There is a strange cultural disconnect that is hard to describe. Legitimate concerns that could once be freely discussed are now brushed aside as career limiting challenges to authority. It is a more authoritarian and insincere feeling organization in which the highest leaders seem to feel that questions are a personal challenge. And leaders who were around before the big restructure are quietly disappearing.
Overall, it's a bad job market at the moment. Xero is still a lot better than nothing, and I am sure many other places, but like any place it is not perfect.
