Supportive colleagues, but toxic management and outdated tech
Pros
Colleagues are generally good at their jobs and support each other, the environment among regular employees is good. Your immediate superiors try to shield you. There's a yearly employee review for feedback and a possible pay increase. The business domain itself is very interesting.
Cons
Toxic and extremely demanding upper management, with unpaid overtime. There's no structure, organization, or clear direction, it feels like a sinking ship. There is zero onboarding or training, none at all. You learn everything on your own by struggling through every task assigned to you. Be aware that the entire codebase is legacy VB6, a language and IDE from 1998, so good luck getting comfortable with it or actually growing as an engineer. The plans to migrate from VB6 to modern technologies have no clear timeline, and despite what management says, nothing meaningful is being done. Most work is constantly delayed, incomplete, faulty, lacking requirements, and rushed, which leaves you maintaining and adding to a growing pile of dead code. On top of that, client meetings become exercises in hiding the mess, and you end up exposing yourself. Eventually I felt like I was getting worse at my job, that my skills were declining rather than growing, and once you learn the obsolete codebase, there's genuinely nothing left to learn. Finally, they even cancel the exit interviews, because they already know what they will hear and what their faults are, yet make no effort to fix them!
