Trek Bicycle is fine as a corp... but the web side is completely mismanaged, especially Java side.
Pros
- Great on-site mountain biking park - Great employee bike and misc purchasing program - Great work-life balance (well this is because management does not know how to push people nor clearly define tasks)
Cons
- Not enough Sprint planning: developers will see most of the tasks the first time on sprint planning and was asked to provide an estimate so work can start the next day with no coding diving nor architectural planning. A lot of times ticket only note things are broken but what way should it be. Management STOPPED people from planning a sprint ahead. - No Retro: Retro let team reflect what works and what does not, which provide a communicate platform for team to communicate and to learn. Management find this useless and cut it. - No architectural decision: There are no architects in the firm. Code base has been in use for 10+ years, tons of features are just there on the site and NO ONE has an idea if those are working and there are no plans to find out. Package design are not there; instead of using web services, you have to deploy jars left and right with no clear plan of improvement. Code is very unstable and the developer does not have much faith in it. The clear objective is to establish baseline and then plan forward; where the management wants to move everything to cloud and change svn to git (to this day i still don't get why would they feel justified for doing so) - ZERO regression test: Yup you heard it! there are only two qa with the team, and they fired the one who worked on automation and has deep knowledge in real life testing. Still no plan of having regression test. - High turnover rate: On the Java side, there is only one programmer has worked full time more than one year; right now there are more contractor than full-time. All the managers since 2012 left with in 2 years. - Unprofessional management: Permanent employee will get let go with no warning. Middle management will sacrifice people beneath them to make them look better. - Weak middle management: When requirements come down, they would just react. They do not protect the team form useless work. Performance review was very surprising most of the time ( It is really hard to have this happen when there are sprint review every 2 weeks)
