This company has no development methodology in place, example Scrum, Kanban etc. and no formal QA department. There is very little long turn planning and ever done and everything is done in panic mode. They expect you to be interrupted perhaps every ten minutes to look at bug issues, which makes it very difficult to focus on the difficult technical material which is your primary task. Oh and you are not supposed to use a debugger or see data, instead you are supposed to fix hundreds of thousands of lines of technically complex, undocumented spaghetti code by logical analysis. As you would expect in this environment the products are very buggy and unreliable, more a hacked together mess developed reactively and not proactively.
One person makes all decisions here, individual accomplishments are not appreciated and are not encouraged. This is extreme micromanagement, you are not allowed to think for yourself, yet are paradoxically told to take ownership of products. Any attempt to take ownership just is overruled by micromanagement. By micromanagement I mean down to the level of names and widths of columns in the database are dictated to you. There is no opportunity to grow beyond a staff position as only the owners make decisions.
The owners believe they are the only ones who know anything but they are not experts in software, up to date on modern programming techniques, nor overly knowledgeable in accounting as they are not CPAs, yet they won’t listen to the accountants and software professionals that they have on staff. As could be expected the product design is not designed as accountants would want.
This company has meetings that go on for hours on end and no decision is made, but even if you sit in five hours of meetings you will be expected to have your work done that day. Also, be prepared to come back after Thanksgiving and having the previous Thursday and Friday off and be yelled at for the things that aren’t done when it’s been a week, when the week was only three days of which eleven hours was probably spent in meetings.
