Take everything you know about best practices and throw it out the window. You won't need it. It's mind boggling how a company of this size can be so bad at planning, designing, and developing business-class software. Rank-and-file devs keep their heads down and do as they're told, but they're working within the restrictive confines of a bloated, monolithic, and unnecessarily complex architecture.
Because the platform is such a brittle, cumbersome mess, tasks take orders of magnitude longer to complete than they normally would. Often times fixing one bug means breaking two (or more) things elsewhere. Re-creating bugs locally and end-to-end developer testing are a major pain.
The company relies heavily on the Scaled Agile Framework. SAFe is not agile. It's waterfall with sprints, agile ceremonies, and a multitude of performance metrics that management can hold over your head. When it's executed well it's merely annoying and heavily bureaucratic. When it's executed poorly (like it is at CSG) it's a complete hindrance to productivity and morale.
The project involves multiple dev teams, and there's definitely a pecking order. The favored teams get all the really visible, high-value work, and the lesser teams get to fight over the table scraps that nobody else wants to do.
