If you are here to understand the company's culture to accept an offer, this review aims to help you with an informed decision.
##Leadership
The compassion and empathy advocated by the Cox Leadership are way distant in vAuto SVP level leadership and reporting management chain. The direct, frontline managers appear to be doing fine; but powerless. They are merely puppets employed to run an agenda. It has a highly localized culture, very hierarchical and bureaucratic. There is a strict division of authority. Decision making is highly top-down; demonstrating a drama which makes others feel it is not so.
One of the leaders calls himself a benevolent "dictator"; talks very nice but you are on the hook if you disagree with him. There is another Director level employee who thinks he is the director, manager, architect, developer, and all in all; he needs to control everything, don't know how to support and grow others. He has zero organizational leadership experience.
## Process
The company is very processes heavy. Every engineer/manager/product person needs to submit a daily timesheet, which is essentially a mockery and way to fool the system. Nobody knows why they are doing it (though I poked and understood; but when asked on the accuracy I was frowned upon and asked to step back).
The environment is very waterfall (though there are "agile" used everywhere). There is a whole group called Agile (including a VP for Agile!) whose only job is to obsess over the process. They are measured and penalized over the process called "CAFE," which is a modified version of "SAFE." This process is highly designed to help a top-level executive to bring micro-management in action, in disguise.
Teams are highly scrutinized over story points, standardization. The agile group is working on innovative ways to measure employee productivity, efficiency, and predictability. They have no clue on how Software Engineering works. They think of engineers as flexible, fungible, and portable workers. There is no notion of service ownership.
## Product and Technology
Some codebases are 15 years older and untouched. Many parts of the product are a decade old. You are not empowered to bring a difference. Engineers are purely code monkeys. Huge tech debt everywhere.
Decisions are not data or customer-driven. It is mostly sales driven. Or else one of the influentials may have a crazy idea and then everyone will rally around delivering it.
## HR
I had a similar experience from HR as that of a prior feedback provider. They are always on the side of a VP or executive leader. If you reach out to them, they will try to keep themselves safe, and well, you are doomed.
## Overall Culture.
You can be successful here if you agree your BOSS is always right. Don't ask tough questions. Nobody likes it. Don't challenge the status quo. Watchful with whom you are talking to. Most of the team members don't feel safe to voice their opinion. If you just need a job and be peaceful with not taking ownership; don't look any further.
## Hiring process
Not transparent. If you are recommended by someone in an influential role, very likely that you can get it. Your Boss can cheat the system to make it happen. There may not be any de-brief as well; if someone up the top has made up his mind they will go for it. Challenging those decisions will simply put you at risk.
#Advice
If you like a place where you want to just write some code, comfortable to follow orders without question, happy to put some fake metric in, wants to balance your time with other things in life, and don't care about anything else, then maybe this is a good place for you.
If you are autonomous, passionate, customer-driven, high on ownership, and likes to challenge the status quo, drive things forward, learn and grow - rethink!
