Pros
- Very flexible work from home policy. You can setup a schedule where you work from home full time, which is very progressive. - Brand new facilities opening 9/22 for folks who work in the office - The developers and QA engineers who have been here for years are very helpful and knowledgeable. - Test automation conscious development and testing - Starting to develop with newer, interesting technologies (include mobile applications) - Modern marketing department
Cons
- The SDO is moving from Agile to a waterfall SDLC. This in itself is not an issue, but there are little to no requirements for projects, so it's very hard to estimate entire waterfall project timelines, understand what to develop, and understand what exit criteria to which QA should test. - Project timelines are not readjusted when scope, resources, size, or cost changes. Employees are asked to make broad estimates for development or testing with little knowledge of the project, and are held accountable for any dates given, no matter the level of confidence in the date. - Little to no collaboration between management and individual contributors. Managers are told to "get it done at all costs" by senior leadership, and thus the individual contributors must respond to constant resource shifting and overtime to finish a project by the original estimation date. - Management does not understand what it takes to build software. There is a mentality that the SDO should just "do it" for each project. They don't listen to suggestions for process improvement. - Due to high attrition rates and more work than the SDO can handle, developers and QA engineers are constantly swapped between projects to the biggest fire, sometimes on a weekly basis. Employees are expected to make up for missed time on other projects with overtime. - Routine, significant overtime is expected, and this time is not compensated in any way. - There is no voice for the employee. The internal surveys that are sent around from HR clearly show a decline in employee morale, productivity, and desire to work here. There has not been significant action to address these issues. - Senior and Executive leadership do not directly address the issues presented by the SDO workers. Managers are powerless to effect any change, and thus the individual contributors are left to deal with the mess. - Due to changing scope and lack of requirements, development cannot always deliver to testing on time. As a result, the testing cycles are shorter than needed, and the quality of the products suffer. The defects that are not caught in testing due to condensed cycles are instead found by clients. - 0 defect release policy. Instead of a high water mark for defects counts at a release, the decree is that all defects found must be fixed before a release is GA. This makes for extremely stressful stabilization periods with endless defect fixes, testing, and builds.
