The hiring and interview process paint a picture of what the company wants to be, but Berkadia has a long way to go before we get there. Here are some things I wish I had known when deciding whether or not to accept a position at Berkadia:
1. Growing pains and cultural conflict
Berkadia is trying to transition into a tech company but a complex organizational structure and politics are making for a slow transition.
New hires, with experience in making the digital transformation, are helping greatly, but in the mean time, we have a lot of politics in play.
2. Tech debt
The Polaris Platform is a political theater and has become a sunk cost fallacy. Highly coupled and very low cohesion. Development is slow and business domains are blurred. Middle management spins that everything is fine and developers are ignored when they raise concerns about the architecture.
Once again, new hires are bringing a wealth of knowledge, many with a strong understanding of how microservices should be architected. Hopefully together we'll be able to drive change.
3. Security theater
The office network and VPN block Google Suite (including gmail and hangouts), iCloud, some music streaming, SSH, and various websites. HTTPS is man-in-the-middled and all Internet traffic is tracked through a proxy. It's so encumbering that many of us tether to our phones or connect to other wifi networks in the building.
Windows PCs are so locked down that PC advocates have opted for an Apple laptop instead, nevertheless, the Apple laptops run an outdated version of MacOS because the remote management and domain tools won't run on newer operating systems.
4. Restricted tools and permissions
Slack is banned with great prejudice by leadership - so many have fought and lost that battle. Github, Gitlab, Trello, Jira, and Leankit are out too.
Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Azure DevOps are the available tools.
Adobe XD was the only design/prototyping tool allowed, but when the entire UX team up and quit, apps like Figma and Sketch started making an appearance.
Developers can't create git repositories and branching is not allowed. Also, repositories follow a strict naming convention: [name]-[technology]-polarisPlatform
5. Not delivering value
This is the one that is most difficult for me. Because of the above issues, especially the tech debt, we are not delivering value to end-users or the industry. We spend a lot of time on non-problems and building things that are not core to our business.
