iHerb "pitches" their benefits to look like a cool software company. There's a on-site gym, free snacks and drinks, arcade room, yoga classes.
But the day to day iHerb is a traditional company where the development teams is treated like a expense. Management keeps on cutting costs from development teams. In my past experience in actual software-first companies the development team and team members is treated as assets and the core management would aim to grow and develop the team and team members. That doesn't happen here at iHerb.
iHerb's business is ecommerce and it's expected that developers would get the latest equipment and laptops but cheap Latitude i5 machines are provided. This is the most basic laptop and literally is a huge brick. Older team members shared it is because management wants to reduce computer costs and these paper weight laptops are cheaper than the previous i7 machines.... For a ecommerce company it is a surprise to not be provided the proper tools to support our job.
Another cost that was cut was the actual QA department. Instead developers are now "told" to do our own QA because management "decided" that developers are actually the ones building the features. This is exactly the type of top-down, no visibility decision making that happens at iHerb. Don't expect your voice to be heard, management just plows ahead.
Even though the QA is now folded into daily development overhead, no new processes were integrated into the publish cycle by technical leadership, no additional time was provided, no additional resources to allow us to set up automated testing or testing plans. Nope, developers are just "told" to make sure our work does not have bugs in code. This is not a replacement for getting rid of QA teams! On top of this, during performance review times, many team members received negative marks on "quality of work" with the reason that bugs were reaching production.... how surprising.
Another great story of success at iHerb is the attempted transition to React Native. The CTO went to a conference and heard a talk about React Native and went gung ho trying to implement it at iHerb. The problem? He's not technical. Instead of leading by example and paving the way to develop a solution, he followed the iHerb management way of "telling" the team what to do. The mobile Android and iOS teams were then told to learn Javascript and transition to React Native. Again. No process, no support, just "telling". Pretty much half the mobile team said "thanks, but no thanks" and quit. After almost a year of attempting to do React Native, the project was scrapped. So, no React Native, and we lost really talented developers.
Not only is the development process a mess at iHerb, but so is the product development process. During the hiring process managers proudly declare that iHerb is "agile" and follows "sprints". iHerb does not follow agile. Sprints are not protected, and there are always "urgent" requests pushed into the "sprint". The problem is that iHerb is privately owned, and many "special" projects will come directly from the CEO as "top priority" which must be immediately worked on. Developers are assigned tasks and expected to build features because the CEO wants it. Many times the WHOLE team (including the product owners) know the feature does not make sense, but what the CEO says, must be done. Most of the time these "urgent" projects are started while the CEO is still making decisions on core functionality. This is probably iHerb's meaning of "agile". The development process is so "agile" that many times after development is finished and published, the CEO will change his mind a few hours later and tell the team to change the feature back. It understandable if there are metrics to gauge whether a feature is not performing as expected, but the CEO's decisions are not made from metrics. It is just whether the CEO will suddenly decide he doesn't like the feature anymore. The running joke for new team members is that they are "fully on boarded" after they've had one of their projects scrapped the same week it was published. "Welcome to iHerb!"
Because of this repeated throwing away of work there is no feeling of personal ownership of any projects. In other companies, team leaders will explain the business purpose a feature is supposed to solve, and the team will work together to solve the problem. It is hard for the team to have a sense of ownership in the work because we know it is very easy for our work to be thrown away.
