Development department morale is extremely low, with high recent turnover that included a long-time veteran lead engineer all privately citing management as their reason for leaving. Many current engineers are looking to exit for the same reasons:
- The code base is enormous, disorganized, and largely undocumented.
- Minimal training on how anything is supposed to work, less even than Support personnel. This leads to a lot of redundancies.
- Best practices are largely ignored and at times fought against. Anti-patterns are the norm.
- Generous score of 4 on the Joel test.
- Micromanagement.
- Unrealistic deadlines (Nearly every development task is assigned .25 days. It's a running joke).
- Rushed and inconsistent production release schedule that often bypasses QA testing and sends untested code to production, for which the engineers are then blamed when inevitable problems emerge.
- Management is easily offended by professional disagreement, even going so far as giving employees the silent treatment for things like casually mentioning to someone outside the department that QA didn't have enough time to test.
- Department management plays clear favorites towards a single engineer, even going so far as to suggest in meetings on more than one occasion that other members of the department should give him part of their paychecks.
- Processes are nearly non-existent. Much of the process that does exist is outdated. The few good processes in place had to be implemented in spite of, not because of, department management.
- QA Release schedule is "We've GOT TO make a release today!"
- Dishonesty during hiring process, for instance job advertised as "Flex Time" with remote as needed, but after hire this is clarified as "be in by 9:30 and work at least 8 hours every weekday; weekends don't count. Remote is discouraged." After multiple requests for all paperwork to be signed prior to leaving my previous job and only getting the Employee Handbook in return, I was presented with an onerous and overreaching employment contract on my first day.
