Michaels reviews

1. CIO is an absolute dictator on how every single product should look or feel. He pretty much micro-managed every team and thought everyone was stupid other than himself. 2. All the existing managers are bootlickers to the CIO. Whoever dare to say no to the CIO either left the company or being isolated from touching any projects. 3. Some of the tech managers don’t even understand the technology needed to build the product. All they will ask is - can you do it and how fast can you get it done? When it comes to meeting, due to not knowing the tech, they sometimes throw you under the bus because they want to make sure their job is secure. 4. No process, no test and no documentation. You’re on your own if you don’t make friends. 5. Things change everyday. There is no set requirement whatsoever. All your hard work is nothing if the CIO doesn’t like it. 6. If they bring up a new requirement today, they expect you to finish it tomorrow. Deadline? There is no deadline, cause you’re supposed to work 24*7. 7. Extremely stressful work atmosphere all the time. CIO will openly embarrass you if you are a nay sayer.

- Horrible WLB - They hired a bunch of engineers in China to take advantage of their 996 culture (working from 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week) and cheap labor. This culture is taking over the technology department at Michaels. - Ridiculous deadlines with ambiguous requests. After each deadline upper management promised that the WLB would be better and processes would be put into place, but they were all lies. - No such thing as being on a team with a manager, product manager and a few engineers using Agile methodologies. You are just thrown at a project and told to code. - Upper management does not understand the importance of proper planning and architecting solutions before implementation. It is all about getting things done as quickly as possible so that upper management can look good and deliver on promises they made to demo the product. - Daily meetings to demo our work and progress to upper management and the CIO. The level of micro-management is insane. There were some weeks where we had to be on a zoom call all day while working so upper management could "see progress".