An IT Nightmare - Software Developer Athene Employee Review

1.0
Aug 15, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Nice building, fast paced, good location.

Cons

The culture in the the IT department is completely toxic. Sr Leadership only cares about who they can impress and not about the business. The CTO constantly lies in front of business units so he can “manage the message”. Transparency is frowned upon creating trust issues between departments. Processes are overwhelming and a complete burden on innovation. You can spend hours on paperwork and meetings to get code to deployed. This may also involve several handoffs. Modern software development practices such as TDD, CI/CD and DevOps are discouraged. Tech debt stacks up and things break all the time. Systems are tightly coupled together making changes difficult. It is impossible to find good talent as Athene has such a bad reputation within the local IT community. This year there was another massive turnover in staff which caused business knowledge to go out the door and perpetuates the problems. Sr leaders blame their staffing issues on the workload instead of looking at the culture they have created. You are discouraged about stating issues on employee surveys, so that leadership can look good. The CTO and CIO don’t delegate any power yet they feel free to blame others when things go wrong. There is no ownership of issues within the leadership and fear is rampant among staff.

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2.0
May 5, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Flex Time. Earliest your schedule can start is 630am.

Cons

The micromanaging in this department is insane no matter whose team you wind up on. There is no accountability. Quantity over Quality. The procedures for work lists are a mess and are constantly changing with no explanation. You aren’t allowed to come to conclusions on your own. You MUST ask POD. Management will ask for overtime every single week (max 10 hours) and look down on you if you don’t do any. QA is very toxic. WFM is even worse. Year end reviews are a joke. Your salary increase will not even make a dent in the rising cost of your insurance nor the cost of inflation. Work from home is allowed (barely). 4 days a month. If you’re out of WFH you either beg to use next months or forced to use No fault. If you want to advance your career choose any other company. There are minimal opportunities (with good pay) in PIP. They will auto decline almost every job you try to apply for internally. It’s difficult to be apart of any ERG as you are only allowed 1 hour a month to participate in activities or meetings. Being at the second WDM location means you miss out on a lot of things Athene (main building) has to offer. The CEO stated you are not chained to your desk when an employee asked why we don’t have Veterans Day off. The CEO also stated to not pay attention to the media when talking about our POOR stock prices. An Apollo board member is mentioned in the Epstein files.

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