They ruined their culture during 2020
Pros
Before 2020, work life balance was good, managers were generally encouraging. A lot of the reviews here are people who have been given incentives internally to fill this out with positives. 2020 showed a disastrous change in the work culture. A year ago I would’ve agreed with the positive reviews.
Cons
The office’s agile transformation is a mismanaged disaster and they chose to go through with it during Covid lockdown. Processes change every month and they don’t tell anyone. It doesn’t match with agile done anywhere else so you can’t study and learn it. You’ll get caught not knowing a new process and there is no accountability on the part of management for its lack of communication- it’s always your fault for not knowing. Leadership is unqualified so business strategy is non existent. Lower level employees have seen cuts to almost everything to compensate for the financial losses poor leadership continues to incur for years. 2020 just accelerated it. The only way the company grows is to buy other companies to compensate for their incompetence. Training and raises have been cut from the budget (unless you’re an exec - they still get full everything) except farmers specific training that will be useless to you outside of this of this company. Unqualified people stay in their jobs for 20 years because they know they can’t get a job anywhere else. The problem is that they think they’re qualified so they grind qualified employees down until they can fire them or harass them into quitting. Managers are empowered by HR to bully and harass employees with any fear tactics they can legally get away with. PMO is now seeing a great resignation with many remaining asking those who left to help them get out. It’s also not enough to do your job here. You have to be performatively active parroting company approved politics and active in extra curricular activities in order to get your bonus. You also have to do multiple stretch assignments - next thing you know you’re working at 150% capacity dancing like alan animal above and beyond your actual job. Culture has changed from being supportive to one of fear and overworking people literally into the hospital. It was quite common to see somebody break down in tears on a WebEx. If you want to work 16 hour days plus weekends and have 3 meetings at the same time while being micro managed by your boss, you can do that here. Diversity and Inclusion is a joke and they should just stop pretending. They pretend to care and release anonymous surveys and when almost everybody submitted “poor work life balance” as an issue they responded by… doing absolutely nothing about it and put money toward PR about how this is a “good place to work”. Teams are “every man for himself” so it is now a culture of finger-pointing, throwing people under the bus, and breaking people. The average workday here is a game of hot potato squid games. The atmosphere where I was is beyond toxic and hostile. I have never worked for a place before where I was concerned that people I work with might die due to over work and abuse, but that’s the post-2020 Farmers. Jeff Daily is too busy filming “look I have a black friend” PR videos and does not care. Given that he chose to lay off most of the staff ages 55+ in 2020, perhaps he should consider retiring to save money himself. Executives are so rich they have five houses while people on the ground floor doing the actual work and suffering are struggling to make ends meet. It’s actually impressive how poorly they managed 2020 and 2021. What a huge negative difference in culture! There’s no way they can come back from this. So many relationships between people are broken in the company that can never be mended. I hope I never see anything like this again. Of course, you might be in a department that’s managed better than mine or you might be under worked. There are pockets of the company where people aren’t getting hardly any work to do and are just skating along working four hours a day. If so, just know that it’s only time until the dominoes fall and it hits you.