On my team, work was split into two streams - one was the regular kinds of work we did to make our code work better. The other was being on call and handling things when they break, which is super often. About once a week major issues would happen and every night when you're on call there will be upwards of 5 issues that you get alerted for.
The boss and coworkers offered almost no support. My coworkers often knew as little as I did and my boss was always in meetings so he never had time to explain things. Even when he did he would get angry at me for not understanding. He was terrible at explaining things - something that many people at vAuto suffer from, although to a certain extent things are built in a convoluted non-intuitive manner that makes them hard to explain anyway.
About 6 months into my job I realized I wanted to quit but the company wasn't paying me enough to save up enough to quit. I trimmed down my budget and began looking for other jobs.
I wanted to switch teams but nobody would take me unless my boss recommended me because he was "revered" in the company. The boss was a bully, very rude, and the only reason he was "revered" is because he would do things nobody else wanted to do - like wake up at 4am to fix production because something stupid happened. Everyone thought he was a "badass" but really most of the code he wrote was terrible. He wrote a large service that our company relied on a lot, but it was so terrible, brittle, and unfixable that it was eventually scrapped and rewritten from scratch. How many times have you known company to rebuild a large piece of software from scratch? He also wrote our config management system which was another convoluted mess that was always experiencing problems.
Finally, my boss would always give me mixed signals. One day he would encourage me to ask more questions when I was confused, then he would be in meetings all day for 4 days in a row, then he would come back and ask my why it wasn't complete - it wasn't complete because you wrote this convoluted piece of crap and nobody else can answer my questions about it except you and you're never here. Then, he would comment in my performance review that I "asked too many questions."
In summary, vAuto is a terrible place to do any kind of devops or infrastructure work, because the on call duties are awful, the managers responsible for the delivery/devops portion of the business are awful, and the software is far too convoluted to understand and fix without serious amounts of help. Compounding the problem is an unsupportive, poisonous culture where you are discouraged from asking questions because you should be able to figure things out on your own.
