Stable job but slow career progression - Assistant Principal ST Engineering Mission Software & Services Employee Review

Get to go to work and have a job.

We are basically contracted staff who can be terminated anytime. Mgmt knows nothing about what we do, and there aren't good leaders to elevate our skillsets.

Old technologies, Messy system design,

I worked in MSS for 1 year. This place is a mess from the start. Here are the cons you need to know before entering this specific department/project. 1. To get your personal laptop for work took around 1 and a half month. 2. Close to zero or outdated documentations. 3. Requires 24/7 standby duty paying you a bare minimum of 1 or 2 hundred dollars. 4. The lack of contexts in doing your job properly is huge, u have to keep asking questions from different parties due to a lack of proper onboarding as well as documentations. 5. Politics plays a huge part here, you receive few different directions from different manager on performing your tasks, 6. Day 1 developers own the code but as a Day 2 developer you are expected to resolve anything that goes wrong when you are not the one coding. A firefighter in this messy project. 7. Restructuring of processes is very common. At each restructuring, it gets worse and worse. Turnover rate is as high as 60% due to the amount of workload. 8. As a software engineer, you are expected to write up emails communicating with different external parties/authorities as well as doing up excel sheets. Start to question whether you are an admin or a software engineer. 9. Salary is on the lower-end and management comes out with really bad processes, making your job/task more difficult. 10. Single point of failure when only a few people knows the whole entire system, start to make you wonder what are the rest of the people actually doing. 11. It is a game of taiji, people are throwing irrelevant task/problems to one another, nobody taking up ownership. 12. You will be doing really time consuming task like transferring of podman images for manual deployment which takes 1-2days, manually modifying yaml files to point to new version for deployment, building docker images of all microservices which took up almost entire day. OT is very common and it is unpaid. You probably get a half/full day off that's it. Advice: This job is the definition of trauma. If you ever consider joining here, don't.