Token QA Hires, No Onboarding – Three QA contractors were brought on board a week before my redundancy, without interviews or proper team introductions, signaling process dysfunction.
Sudden, Unjustified Layoff – Despite consistently positive performance reviews, I was laid off under a vague “cost-cutting” banner with zero transparency - not even an apology or any empathy shown.
Broken Release Processes – Frequent production releases shipped critical bugs, leading to repeated customer escalations.
Endless Firefighting – Day-to-day work devolved into triaging live incidents rather than stable feature development.
Massive Manual Regression – Every sprint for 2 weeks the entire QA team was bogged down in an exhaustive, manual regression cycle due to a lack of automation and clear test plans. When bugs were found and fixed regression wouldn't restart and they would be testing on an outdated codebase.
Outdated Technology Stack – Legacy tools and frameworks with no investment in automation made routine testing slow and error-prone.
Toxic “Watch Your Back” Culture – Despite talk of collaboration, there were no formal processes; on day one I was privately warned to “watch out” for certain colleagues.
