I have been feeling down for the past few months and decided to come here, and, shockingly (but unsurprisingly), all recent reviews of my company have been negative. I couldn't agree more.
Let me start by saying that this is the most dysfunctional team and organization I have ever worked with in my career. I see a lot of reviews pointing to some issues, but I am going to be more specific:
1. The BU presidents are a joke. One publishes videos as if he were an ESPN jockey, and this is deemed as impressive in this organization. Another has no clue what he's doing, yet he leads the largest money-making BU. He's just sitting on recurring revenue and has no clue about innovation. They come up with an arbitrary budget to fund "innovation" and have many product managers who seem lost when they come to a meeting. Then they get into unproductive arguments when they don't like estimates. Well, guess what, our output suffers. The content teams are a joke, and educators will never learn anything from what we publish. Please note that they are supremely greedy, and forming some nursing coalition is just a sham. You see the president in the office rarely because he works remotely from various places, but whenever he comes in, it feels like people are tidying the place for his majesty, followed by a round of lip service.
The second largest, the fitness one, I have limited exposure to, and that president recently passed away, so I have no comments.
2. Let's talk about our wonderful, incompetent ex-Cerner CTO who supposedly got promoted in just a few years to that role. He has the IQ of a joker. Often clueless in meetings, he only cares about some shoddy metrics (that, by the way, get bloated and manipulated) and then wants more money to deliver incompetent work. He plays manipulative games so frequently that he is seen as ineffective by many in the office. And his leadership team - one, close to retirement, heads CISO but lacks essential knowledge in their areas of responsibility. Another one, who sits in his office, appears to be overly compliant (and got promoted within a year of joining). Some guy sits out of New York, apparently came from a defunct BU and was terrible at tech to begin with. All the others are either no good or just follow the incompetent CTO.
3. Middle management: A few of them are extremely good, but most are again incompetent. They've never worked in a tech company and, for example, to create an API, their basic aptitude is useless.
4. Working from the office is intolerable, though I'd prefer to work remotely more often, but the company's rigid hybrid policy doesn't allow that. The main issue with office work, however, is the constant mind games I witness daily. There's a general reluctance to get work done, with everyone using prioritization, SAFe planning, and inflated estimates as excuses. I've even been asked to pad my estimates, only to be expected to deliver ahead of schedule. This kind of game-playing is a regular occurrence here.
