Two months into my time at Zapproved, the culture changed and became more impersonal, more high-pressure, and more hostile to my growth as a junior developer. I rarely ever received feedback from management on my performance. I was never told that my performance was good and what I was doing well. I was never counseled for poor performance and told what I needed to do to improve. The first time I ever received a poor evaluation of my performance was the day I was fired for failure to meet team performance standards. Even then I was given no explanation of how my performance was substandard. I was fired with no warning. This is unacceptable.
The Zapproved culture has also grown more oriented around the bottom line of rapid product delivery, maybe even unrealistically rapid delivery. The pressure my team felt recently to improve our performance feels like the result of a failure to set realistic delivery goals. Being a junior developer made me an easy scapegoat for the company's failures to plan properly.
