A slow-moving "big corporate" where there's no passion or drive. Lots of red tape. I did barely any programming during my time at the company, despite emphasizing this as my main desire (it's not just me either, others feel the same way). Deep management hierarchies and top-down leadership who bring in sudden policy changes without consultation means your manager is basically powerless. Engineers are treated as bodies to throw at any problems the company has with zero regard for what their interests and expertise/skillsets. Priorities change all the time. You're basically treated as "just another cog in the machine", but given no actual onboarding or training required to do your job. They expect you to wear many different hats and do "DevOps" type work. Jira tickets will appear on your team's Kanban with zero explanation and sometimes no detail at all on them, that have no development involved whatsoever. If you are lucky enough to ever touch your IDE, it will be trivial bug fixes or config changes. Feature development is tedious due to the company's horrendously complicated build & release pipelines and properties, despite multiple teams working on this full-time to improve it. Despite having QAs, SREs, Level 3 support, network engineers, platform engineers and dedicated teams for infrastructure, regular devs are expected to be involved in day-to-day operations and infrastructure problems that is beyond the scope of what a software developer ought to be doing: this is rationalised as "we're engineers, not developers". The whole notion of "reactive" and on-call policy is not at all well-thought out; by the company's own admission, nobody is expected to have the answers, but are nonetheless required to participate and effectively act as a "call centre" for production incidents. There is zero attempt at onboarding people onto the tooling (e.g. Splunk) and the company's legacy codebase. Lots of time is wasted in refinement sessions and other meetings. Corporate all-hands meetings are a hilarious joke that people laugh about on private channels because they're very American and basically showbiz rather than anything substantial. Too many Slack channels.
