Since you will hear this again and again, don’t forget that Deacom is innovative. Deacom is revolutionary. Deacom is cutting-edge. Deacom is special. Too special, in fact, for:
• Any recent version of their IDE
• Any recent versions of their programming languages
• Any modern source control tool
• Any modern front-end framework
• Any modern database design (because who needs foreign keys?)
• Any established task tracking system
• Any established object-relational mapping tool
• Any established software architectures
• Any established design patterns
• Any dependency injection
• Any actual unit testing
• Any actual refactoring
• Any software design techniques
• Any reasonable timelines
• Any formal training or continuing education
• Any dev involvement in the product design
• Any software development life cycle
All that and more. The last item deserves emphasis: this is a waterfall development cycle with very little validation and no user acceptance testing. There are very few checks before your code goes into production. Not only will you be blamed for any resulting issues, but you might be publicly shamed too if you’re lucky. Even if you are a favorite here, the only times you’ll ever receive any kind of positive feedback is twice a year when performance evaluations come around. Then you’ll return to being nothing but a workhorse for the other 99% of the year.
Top-level management started this product purely because they saw a business need for it. They wrote some of the original code because they had to, but look anywhere and you will see evidence that they had no real interest or understanding of software engineering. That is fair, it’s not for everyone. But HR won’t hesitate to spin that and tell you that their corporate ladder “features programmers all the way to the top” as if you will be accepted and understood. This is very misleading; that level of empathy simply does not exist here.
In the company’s early years, the product was written in a language that you could’ve called archaic even back then; the features of this language had very little overlap with anything used today, and the product had massively outgrown the platform. The team at the time, young and inexperienced, managed to set up a web app in a newer language that they proceeded to use as a life raft to save their mountain of spaghetti. And that was it. That’s right, the entire product and all of its messy outdated practices were directly ported over without any redesign. Yet it was enough for them to start considering themselves geniuses, forever favoring their own custom solutions over anything well-established, and they managed to do it for so long that they gained ultimate authority over the code base and its cryptic, buggy, unoptimized, undocumented inner workings. To this day, they do many of the interesting new features in secret (and very poorly), resulting in a tidal wave of new bugs that the rest of the lowly devs are left to figure out.
You can see from other reviews that a lot of talented folks have come in and tried to wrestle this product into something workable, only to cut their losses and save their sanity. The job posting still promises candidates that they will get to work with modern technologies, but this is incredibly misleading. A very small fraction of devs get any exposure to tech that you could even argue is modern. Plus, this minimal amount of “modern” tech would not exist at all if it weren’t for other experienced devs who had to work on those projects IN SECRET because their deep concerns fell on deaf ears. When working versions of these secret projects were finally discovered by management or revealed in a demo, oh how quickly they were hailed as “yet another brilliant innovation from Deacom.” Devs have gotten into the habit of keeping their own private stash of fixes and improvements because they are inexplicably denied from implementing them -- until those components eventually break, as forewarned, and the finger of blame starts going around. So save those important conversations, and keep notes and documentation on everything you do.
Let’s deconstruct a few more items that are advertised as selling points:
1. Deacom tries to only promote internally -- yes this is true! If you can survive long enough here, you will indeed be promoted. Keep in mind though that because of this, many people do not have the qualifications to be in the positions that they are in, and then unfortunately do not receive any training or further education to get them acquainted so they are set up for failure.
2. Deacom allows you to explore and experiment with your own ideas -- like I said, some side projects have been done in secret but otherwise that’s about it. Once or twice a year, you will be tasked with building a list of goals for yourself to work on -- except that HR reviews all of them, and if you can’t directly show them how your goal is going to help the company make more money, then it won’t be approved. Yes, you as a developer have to try to explain to HR how your highly technical side project or online course is going to help the company profit, and if they don’t understand it then you’re out of luck. Apparently “we’re a decade behind the times” is not a good enough reason. Not that it matters anyway -- you won't actually get any time to work on your goals.
3. Deacom has a thorough, objective interview process -- thorough? Yes. Objective? For some positions, sort of. For other positions, absolutely not, and a lot of candidates’ collective time is wasted. The dev position probably has the most objective interview of them all, and it still largely depends on an IQ test. Did I say IQ test? I meant “skill assessment.”
4. Deacom has been voted as one of Philly’s best workplaces -- there must be some happy departments here, because I can promise you development is not one of them. This award competition is the only time you will ever be asked to give any kind of feedback, and it’s just for the sake of the competition. No one in management or HR will ever ask you how you feel about working there, or what could possibly be improved in terms of workflow, organization, culture, etc. They already know what’s best for you so your opinions don’t matter.
I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface, yet I can’t help but be impressed. Somehow the Deacom life raft is kept afloat by the revolving door of young developers, so fond of their college days that they get lured in by the promise of free food and a ping pong table.
