No Opportunity For Growth After Lowes Acquisition - They Just Trash You
Pros
Before all of the IT Dept at ATG Stores became a Lowes Employee around Oct 2015, we: - Had our own unique company culture that was both fun and engaging - Work hard; play hard mentality. - A true open door policy, as well as approachable upper management. - I felt I was making a real difference. - Time set aside for learning new technologies and research to further my coding skills. Of course all of these "Pros" went out the window once Lowes started choking the life out of us Software Developers by giving us ridiculous challenges and not enough time or resources to get it done. Then by laying off promising developers who just needed help or training to get up to speed.
Cons
AFTER all of the IT Dept at ATG Stores became Lowes Employees, month after month, slowly but surely Lowes people from Lowes Headquarters began either directly replacing upper management positions (rather than promoting senior level ATG people) and people who had been integral in the growth and success of ATG for the prior 10-15+ years before Lowes acquired it were laid off some other Lowes Headquarters people could be promoted (at least thats how it looked). More cons after Lowes Acquisition: - Major Levels of Bureaucracy and heaps of red tape became the norm for a Software Developer doing ANYTHING in the code; this went along with making ATG fall in line with the Lowes Development standards, which didn't seem to work that well. - ATG Stores company culture was slowly but surely suffocated by new Lowes managers stepping on everything (and accelerated the death of our culture after many really GREAT and PROMISING developers/QA people were laid off, myself included) - A Lowes manager who took over a few weeks earlier, decided without actually providing any evidence of said issue that my "skills were not up to the level that Lowes required", however, I was never given a software development aptitude test, my code was not reviewed by this manager and my Lead was deliberately kept OUT OF THE LOOP so they couldn't help clarify my skills... and I can only guess he *thought* he knew what my skills were by looking at my old crusty resume ATG Stores had on file from years before. Had he taken the time to test my skills or gosh even *RE-INTERVIEW ME FOR THE SAME POSITION* I am sure I would have been able to KEEP my job and prove myself. But i was given no such chance, just left on the cutting room floor. Such a shame.
