The most common complaint among coworkers is poor project preparation and too much bureaucracy (meetings, processes).
We often dive headfirst into projects which are quite unclear in scope, but the management already wants to have estimates and target end dates - even before the business requirements and designs are done and approved, or cross-team dependencies are figured out.
The company likes to think of itself as following the agile methodology, but in a lot of cases it seems to be just a facade. We spend time doing SCRUM ceremonies etc, but in the end we don't really adhere to the agile rules. We are often forced to put tickets into the sprint which are not properly prepared, then during the sprint we re-estimate things, add a lot of unplanned tickets to the sprint, remove planned tickets from the sprint etc. This doesn't improve productivity and brings unnecessary stress. Hopefully the engineering managers and CTO will at some point realize the issues and take steps to improve the situation.
In terms of red tape, it sometimes feels like we're wasting time working on some RUP preparation tickets, creating Confluence pages with technical plans (based at best on half-prepared technical requirements with draft designs). Only to realize during the actual implementation, when the requirements are clarified and the designs are approved, that half of this preparatory work was just a waste of time. I guess it's similar in many tech companies, but I feel that this part of the job can be optimized.
The process of getting a promotion and salary raise involves jumping through a lot of hoops, performance reviews, etc. Even then, the worst part is that it's not clearly defined or transparent, and very slow. Even team leads and engineering manager often don't know what's going on with a developer's application for promotion / salary raise. On average, I saw fellow developers get promotions/raises, but it doesn't happen often, and the process is usually full of frustration. I remember only a couple of cases when someone was obviously undervalued, and they got quickly promoted to a more appropriate rank. Once people reach a certain level, it seems quite difficult to go one more step ahead. Sometimes there's a small salary raise given, but it's pretty hard to advance in position.
It seems that a lot of the people in management positions are Hungarians. Well, the company is originally from Hungary, and there are a lot of employees originally from Hungary, these are some valid reasons, but still there are quite a few coworker who feel like there might be some amount of prejudice when choosing who to promote to management, especially at the top management level.
