Yes, Viator Sydney used to be a great place till Vacation Rentals stepped in. Tripadvisor Experiences( Viator) got a new CEO from Vacation Rentals and he brought his team with his. Obvious isn’t it. Quite a few higher management relocated to Sydney and took powers into their hands. From then, its all favourism and politics.
Favourism over Skill:
Managers would never give a chance to the deserving team or the individual, rather they will give it to their favourites. Always, the favourites will get a chance to work on the greenfield projects and to move around new projects and the tech stack. While others need to fix their defects and support the legacy systems.
Lack of Trust:
Difference in opinion is not at all acceptable. Even if you have it, it’s better not to raise it. You will get into their bad books. Forget about quality or maintenance, release it ASAP, if you say no, you will be tagged as a slow performer.
Culture of looking at how many commits you have done in a day/month, how much time you take to deliver a feature at the back of your shoulder. This data could have been used constructively, rather they used it to create an unsafe work culture. You have to be an exhibitionist to thrive. But, the team work was getting destroyed with this culture. Had multiple discussions with the management regarding this, but the efforts were futile.
Time spent on pool and table tennis table will be monitored(not officially though). They would ask us to limit our play time, when the US counterparts visits. (Earlier glassdoor review on the same was removed :))
Lack of Freedom:
Top management has strong choice of the tech stack to be used in the project across the company. No question of right tool for the right job. For Instance, Spring framework is not favoured, because some team /team members didn’t understand them :). Why on earth, you will write their own transaction management and maintain it??? You need to fight hard to justify that the tool you chose is the right one, end of the day it will be rejected and you would be tagged as rebel.