* Excessive focus on hour tracking, even for salaried employees - including software engineers.
- There were debates about how to log hours for lunch and holidays in JIRA. Wat.
- Despite direct managers pushing to keep this extensive hour tracking updated, it was pretty clear it wasn't actually being *used* for anything.
* Silly, useless management decisions.
- They removed all internal office window blinds in the interest of 'transparency'. Seriously.
- Continuing decrease in quality and quantity of perks like snacks and drinks.
* History of quasi-criminal shenanigans at higher levels of management that is still impacting the company.
* Weird addition of offshore employees to teams whose managers did not understand why they were getting them.
- Most of the offshore employees didn't work out, but sucked large amounts of training time down.
- Caused morale problems and general confusion, especially over job security.
* Decrepit Perl codebase full of broken custom implementations of now-standard Perl modules, meaning there's little to nothing in the way of documentation.
- Few best practices are followed.
- They were literally anti-comment for years- you can go for dozens of modules without finding a *single* line of commented code.
- No one knows what large portions of the codebase are even for anymore.
* Deep, in-grained acceptance of awful, long, and delicate manual procedures for doing all sorts of common tasks; half of the work being done at any given time was manual 'busy-work'.
* No understanding of continuous deployment/integration despite claims to the contrary; going from code to actual deployment has to go through several other teams for manual sign-off or handling by each and the process takes days to weeks.
* First 'all-hands' involved a handful of people cramming into a small glass-walled conference room, while 90% of employees stood outside and tried to watch and listen to what was going on from outside.
* You're ultimately working to help advertisers - you're not exactly making the world a better place. It's hard to wake up in the morning just to make sure your code produces the right numbers for some marketing drone's spreadsheet.
