• Terribly managed IT department: THD is an unbelievably large and bureaucratic business. Orders come from those more concerned about financial goals, not reality. Direct managers are typically helpful, however senior managers are more concerned about political decisions and office contests than getting the actual work done.
• Chaos: My team was comprised of 26 contractors (20 of which were offshore in India) and 2 THD associates. We worked closely with more teams in similar fashion. Communication is terrible. Logical decisions are often thrown out the window as defect priorities are shifted by senior management who know nothing about the project. This often caused more frustration in management leading to even more illogical decisions. This problem was so terrible for my team that my project was scrapped and rewritten after I left THD.
• Subpar work: Offshore contractors wrote terrible code. Would often walk into work in the morning and pull broken code. Spent most of my time before and after meetings fixing broken code. QA team writes endless defects and has little knowledge about application development.
• Office Space in real life: Though I only had around 3 "bosses" at any given time, I was asked when something would be done probably 6 times a day. Often times we would have a meeting in the morning about how urgent something needed to get done, be asked how long it would take, then be forced to attend another meeting directly after. Forced to give estimates on every defect immediately despite working on a high priority defect that the team is under massive pressure about. Forced to use buggy and slow bug tracking software. Inefficiency played out in a catastrophic way.
• Endless meetings: I attended over 200 meetings in 6 months, and probably spoke for a total of an hour.
• Horrible morale: Contractors and project managers work 60 hour weeks, often staying up until 4 in the morning. Several of my teammates actually had health problems from stress after starting. Because of this, most employees try to shift work to others instead of attack problems themselves
• Few opportunities for career advancement: The higher you go in THD, the more meetings you attend and less real work you actually do. You train to become a manager. For developers, this is a nightmare.
