- Speed over quality. Product issues are left unresolved for years due to a culture of favoring technical shortcuts over thoughtful solutions, contributing to an ever-growing technical debt.
- Many colleagues have a long tenure (which is a good thing), but many also experience “boreout”. Meaning they stay out of comfort, but are quite demotivated and resistant to change, making stakeholder alignment slow and difficult.
- They’ve increased the mandatory office days, and recently reduced the number of days you can work from abroad. That’s been received as a big disappointment, especially for an international company where many people joined for that flexibility.
- Promoting inexperienced or unsuitable employees into managerial roles, sometimes despite prior misconduct reports. This directly contributed to burnout in a team, with the issue needing to escalated to the company union to be taken seriously because leadership failed to act.
- Favoritism exists, with some managers hiring friends who get preferential treatment/access to top projects- a shared experience that continues to harm morale, development opportunities and fairness.
- The environment is quite political despite the small size of the company, which often adds another layer of complexity to getting work done or advocating for change.