I feel lied to.... - Software Manager Honeywell Employee Review

I want to start by saying that most of the positive reviews come from interns and not real employees with experience. So the number of stars is highly inflated. There are also several other major issues here: There are multiple cases of people getting promoted for doing nothing. In addition, they've gotten promoted without offering these positions out to other people. This is unfair and demotivating to those of us that work hard. Promotions are given out not based on delivery; but based on how much you drive a project or your team. This produces an environment where the more competent managers are not rewarded for their technical acumen and wisdom. Your development skills will somewhat stagnate and possibly decline here. Many of us spend time producing nice documents because it looks good for the executives instead of actually developing Software. The executives expect the software developers to do everything. You want customer feedback: YOU go talk to the customer (this is the job of marketing and customer relations). You want to know what the business value of the project is? YOU go calculate it. There are different departments in the company for a reason. We can't do everything! This is one of the only places where the upper level management doesn't listen to the software engineers. If you tell them something is not feasible, they will still go ahead and attempt to build it because they have already made the decision without considering the viability of the project. The project requirements and use cases change mid project (assuming they were even defined in the first place). It's a struggle to determine why you were even working on a project and what the business value is. This causes a chaotic process where at the end of the project, all the departments blame each other because there is no deliverable. While we're bringing up business value: We hardly ever have customers for the products that we build. We build something because somebody in the company thinks it's a good idea without getting customer validation. There is no sane process for selecting metrics to hit for projects. Why does the UI have to respond is 100 milliseconds? Why does the latency of this API have to be 50 milliseconds when the user will only be querying it every 15 minutes? This is all driven by someone just blurting something out in a meeting as opposed to actually analyzing something. Working with other departments is toxic. It's always a constant battle to get the resources that you need because everyone thinks that they are going to be stabbed in the back. The collaboration with other parts of the company is always a political struggle. The executives don't seem to understand that there are legitimate blockers to software projects. When the platform that you have to integrate with is broken, this is a blocker. Telling me to "get it done" doesn't help anyone. You can't just drive people and yell at them for not getting stuff done when there are legitimate high level blockers to your work. Honeywell is a marketing driven company. It seems like EVERYTHING here is done for pure marketing purposes even if the final product isn't that good. Rational functional requirements don't really exist here. As long as it looks good for the cameras, they'll execute it! They want to make it seem like this is the Google of Atlanta. IT'S NOT! The idea that this company operates like a startup is wrong. There is too much bloat in the process for this company to ever function like a startup. The only way some projects are similar to a startup are the hours that you put in because you have to constantly rebuild stuff because the requirements are a moving target. This regularly produces death marches. Everything is driven from the top down. So when you have people that don't really understand software trying to tell people that do how to build software, this causes an immense amount of disconnect, discord, and completely unrealistic expectations. This is compounded by the fact that non-technical people lead projects. This is chaotic because the non-technical people don't understand that we cannot deliver a product without explicit requirements and that what is usually asked is not even remotely close to being viable. Assuming it is viable, the timelines are usually completely unrealistic. It takes forever to get the simplest of tasks done here. What may take a developer a week to achieve takes 2 months because there is so much red tape around everything. It's like the company actively attempts to not release software that they're been working on. Because all of these issues, there is a major attrition and retention problem. Developers are always leaving the company. It's actually sad because I wanted to like Honeywell. I think there was a lot of potential for this company to create some really cool products. We also have some fairly strong developers (many of them leave and go to high profile tech companies). But that get's lost in bloat, politics, and indecision that plagues the executive level. Until the executives stop driving everything, the situation won't improve. Please save yourself some time and don't come here. You'll be sorry that you did.