- Other reviews on Glassdoor mention that leadership doesn't listen to employees: this is 100% factual in my experience and those I work with. Many suggestions, ideas, or avenues of conversations are effectively blocked by people in senior level leadership positions with little to no further discussion.
- A software "architect" is essentially the gatekeeper for "ideas" being implemented -- meaning that teams can't try things or innovate from the ground up and prove out ideas to the rest of the organization. Ideas have to through one person who is effectively a brick wall. If your idea doesn't meet this person's criteria, it's thrown out. This general sense of "being in control" by a select few stifles real innovation and has been a problem in the organization for years, which drove many, many employees away in the past.
- There is virtually no avenue for employees to voice concerns or express how they feel things are going in the company except via their direct managers. And those managers, even though they may agree, have little to no power to do anything about it. People are afraid to speak up here, and that's a problem.
- Very frequently I hear language used like "so and so is being 'beat up' by upper management," giving the overall impression that senior leadership is constantly putting pressure on or strong arming those in middle or lower management.
- I have heard firsthand accounts of the head of HR belittling and insulting employees. All the while there is an internal/external HR slogan of "people first" in the company. It makes the slogan almost laughable.
- There is little to no understanding of what an Agile environment is or is supposed to really look like. Senior leadership doesn't seem to really understand or care, yet they will advertise Agile in their job descriptions. Don't advertise it if it's just a buzzword to you, but you don't embrace the methodology. Don't make teams "prove" Agile to you before you decide whether you really want Waterfall.
- There is a movement towards forcing teams into working specific ways that is feeling very much like a micro-management approach, with little to no feedback from the teams. This is irrespective of how productive or how well the team functions. It can sometimes feel like "big brother is watching you."
- Measuring developer productivity seems to be moving to calculating numbers of story points completed by each team, which shows the organization has no real way of measuring productivity, effectiveness or value delivered to customers.
- "Performance reviews" feel like a joke with a random assortment of various unprofessional documents sent at random times throughout the years with little to no guidance on what "goals" really mean. It feels more like "tell me what you did last year so I can decide if you get a raise."
- Forceful changes in policies (e.g., WFH or travel requirements) come randomly, with little to no warning, impacting just about every employee, regardless if the employee was hired originally having different expectations.
