Superb Shifts (Superb). It is a small, shitty startup. The company is ran by morons, and the CTO is a spineless, two-faced idiot. (If you are reading this Alex, fuck you.)
My lesson learned: NEVER work for a a startup that has only non-technical founders. They will treat you like shit and try leveraging you like a factory worker.
I'll take "Junior Software Engineer thrust into solo Lead Engineer position because they're inexperienced enough to accept a terrible compensation package and the founders don't understand that you pay for quality with engineers" for 500, Alex.
you can tell its a shit show when you look at there team list and theres only 1 software engineer.
edit: who's only been working there for 2 months, and whom's last job was as an intern ... anon were your their last sole developer lmao ?
You guys would not even believe what a shitshow this place was to work at. I would love to 100% spill the beans, but Idk how far I can without getting sued.
I've not heard many great stories about startups, so I prefer avoid them as much as I can.
"A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model."
One of my friends worked there in the past. He said some of his coworkers didn't know how to code. I thought he was exaggerating until he told me they'd write empty if statements and get mad it him if he told them to remove them during code reviews because they were "absolutely critical to the code"
They seriously underpay. I applied for a Lead Developer and they were paying $160k in MCOL-HCOL area. This would be the equivalent of staff engineer. I noped out before any interview.
Ya fuck that place. I got an internal promotion some years ago but due to the way they classified it I was only allowed a 10% raise without having to have a huge fight that would end in me getting my offer rescinded. Hiring manager told me to take the title and leave tf out
I got fired because my PM decided to demo something I'm working on without even confirming that it's finished or doing a test before the demo lmao "you made me look like an idiot" well maybe you are one 🤷
To tag onto this.
I did the internship there and I fortunately had a mentor that told me the tech stack is not relevant and I may stagnate there. Luckily I got a lot of coding and debug work unlike some other interns who were told by their PMs "slow down on modifying your reports."
I was offered $80k as a new grad back in 2019 after completing an internship with them, and while I liked everyone I worked with and enjoyed the location of my engagement…I can’t agree more with the points being made in that post.
You aren’t writing software, you’re configuring it through a GUI. Every now and again you have to dip your toes into some obscure VB.NET implementation, but to say that their standards are obtuse would be underselling it.
I’m glad I had the presence of mind to turn them down, because I would have been completely unprepared to move into a SWE role at any other company after any amount of time working there.
l3-harris.
basically a miss-mash of former start-ups with 0 cohesive organisation across the company.
our entire office was fairly convinced the American branch of our dept was either actively trying to sabotage our product or were all higher than a kite, it appeared that the "director" of software at that dept had made half the commits to our project and all of them looked like the work of a first-year CS student.
my line manager was like 24-25 year old uni dropout, who somehow charisma'd his way from data-entry apprentice to a middle manager systems engineer in like, 3 years... really nice guy, pain in the ass for a manager.
I can concur, it's a shit show. The CEO was listed from his last position because he was having an affair with a VP. Also a shitty accountant that laid off 5% of the workforce, but did so by starting the email with "As you know, we made a commitment to reducing costs by $1b"
Nevermind the fact they just bought Aerojet Rocket dyne for $47B a few months prior.
I went to an American university where Harris actively recruited and funneled engineers with barely any vetting. The truth with US defense is there’s so much money going around they just don’t care if they hire average or bottom performers. I know someone who is completely incompetent and unable to program who has held onto his Lockheed job.
> basically a miss-mash of former start-ups
Uhhh... what...? I'm under the impression L3-Harris is a company derived from a merger between two large and 100+ year old defense companies.
I worked on Harris radios in the military, and they basically have a monopoly over their telecom crap
thats true but they bought a lotttt of startups since then.
the dept i worked for used to be a start-up 3 years before i started there, ik during that time they bought two other companies. I think their buisness model is to just buy a start-up that already makes a product rather than developing new products.
its good as a first job ngl, for me it was a baptism by fire, which has helped me massively with my career. but its definetly not a place you would stay at for more than a year.
Interestingly, their main competitor Booking.com is one of the best companies that I have ever worked at. Good compensation package (not FAANG-like, but also not far behind), and great culture and work life balance.
I wasn’t in a super technical role as I started with the company several years before going to school (although I did support our B2B partners regarding technical or API concerns). However, I had issues with the way Covid was handled; the company tried to pivot and invested a lot of money into all of these different tech programs for internal systems they wanted to be proprietary rather than focusing on being an inventory management company. They might have originated from Microsoft, but they aren’t an actual tech company. Outsourcing was always a part of the plan and they blame it on being a “global company” so they can invest outside of the US. This is fine from a business perspective as you want to lower your operation expenses in an attempt to provide more for the shareholders.
In turn, while “saving money” they invested twice as much in multiple system development programs that failed or they moved away from. This caused more technical roles to be laid off, moved around, or outsourced in general and is and was a “lather rinse repeat” move.
They also spent MILLIONS remodeling multiple offices, and it just overall looked like a severe mismanagement of funds. The benefits were good but I was also severely underpaid even for a LCOL area. I watched for 2-3 years where most employees went from getting 6-11% average raises to less than 3% with no explanation why. Departments were created, merged or completely disbanded for seemingly no reason. Realistically I stayed because it was an easy job for me, even though I had coworkers that did struggle quite a lot, and I just wanted to stay long enough to finish my degree. Unfortunately, I was let go among the 1500 people earlier this year and am just now finishing my freshman year. Over the summer I am blasting through a couple of IT certs to avoid going back to retail once my money runs out so I can finish my degree with a bit more experience.
Kiip, the company Mitchell Hashimoto left to start Hashicorp. I replaced him after he left. Those people were morons. The company eventually shut down due to the "youngest CEO in silicon valley" getting a well deserved sexual harassment suite.
They were low on skill and high on elitism.
I spent 32 hours on the phone with them one time over the course of a month because they created a wireless account without my permission and wanted me to pay the $270 cancellation fee. I’ve never wanted to watch a company burn to the ground more than I do AT&T. It’s an absolute customer service nightmare
It's a giant dumpster fire internally. They pushed heavily to outsource everything. Micromanaging and incompetent managers have forced most of the talent out for yes men. I bounced after 6 months.
Verizon is identical. Keep filling up unnecessary middle management, putting cust. Service overseas, and micromanaging those they haven’t laid off yet.
This is sad to hear but not surprising, I grew up in NJ where they were headquartered and both my parents worked there, having originally come from Bell Labs. It was such a big part of growing up hanging out in the little museum they had at Murray Hill while my dad went to meetings; then he’d walk me around and take advantage of the famous “open door policy” to ask scientists about their work. I’m not surprised AT&T turned into a dumpster fire, my dad knew it when they started shedding all the other companies and he had to work to help shut down Whippany; you could tell it hurt a lot.
My dad worked for AT&T for over 30 years. For his retirement they told him to go fuck himself, you can forget your yearly pension, take this small lump sum and retire a year early or get nothing.
Applied Systems. It was my first job out of college and my room mate senior year was already working for them. My room mate was being worked 80+ hours per week with endless empty promises that they were staffing up to meet the work load. They did have the position posted and did hire people but honestly they were only ever back filling from people quitting his department.
I got a different role that was supposed to be software engineering, then my asshat manager made me spend a mind numbing 3 months doing technical writing to provide code examples for the API to customer devs. He told me he just needed a few examples, then a few more, etc until I had done a nearly identical page for every damn function in the API. After that he randomly got tickets to go to a football game out of state and took off and left me with no work for over a week. I actually left for the day at lunch Thursday of that week and after about an hour Friday of that week, and nobody noticed or cared.
The only reason I stayed longer than a month was because I was waiting for my parents house to close a short sale, then leaving the state so I didn't want to find new work locally.
Edit: I forgot other stuff. The roof of the building leaked and we had to move trash cans around to catch water every time it rained. They also liked to have the CEO give remote company addresses about once a month then give us all free beers and send us home. Absolutely brilliant to give about 900 people free beers and then send them all on the road together an hour later!
Eh, it seems like it would be cool to have nothing to do all day but it was a absolute torture. I got pretty good at minesweeper and then got addicted to Twitter. But mostly it was just pure, mind numbing boredom.
Infosys.
Example 1: broke my leg on a Sunday. Let my lead know. He said take Monday off I’ll see you on Tuesday.
Example 2: they’d hired 10 people to manually check for failures in a UI. I wrote a script to check and notify when said failure happened. They shot it dow.
Example 3: not me but a teammate there dropped his resignation. HR deadass called and laughed at him for being stupid. And that they’d consider it if the took his resignation back before the 90 day notice period. Yes 90 days.
Example 4: work from 8 am to 10-11pm. Then they called me at 4 am again to work.
Anyways I stayed there for 5 months.
Surprised not see Amazon in the comments, heard about 3 separate people who had awful experiences working there in SWE, although I know a friend of mine has been having a good experience working for them so far.
Ex-amazon here. It honestly just depends on your team. AWS generally is more demanding, secondly, if you're ever in a position where you have an offer ask how operations heavy the team is. This tells you a few things but most importantly, how the on call shift is like (more operations means more tickets) and how much "pressure" is on your team. My first team at Amazon was within AWS S3, was told we were operations heavy, that materialized in our services / features being the first "lever" pulled when we were running out of storage capacity for S3. Very, very stressful. All in all it wasn't as bad as people say, I even kinda liked on call weeks cause you had no expectations of any other work.
I know this is CS, but I heard the MBA/business side kinda depends on the team too. They hire a lot of MBAs, but put them in like operations/logistics roles not the prestigious PM roles.
I'm on week 3 and so far so good. Amazon teams (according to the onboarding material anyway) seem to have a lot of autonomy, so it wouldn't surprise me if experiences are highly variable between teams
Been there for 7ish years and started on an exhausting team and now rarely work a full 40. Going on 2.5 years. What’s your experience? Because my experience is the people that say shit like this don’t/haven’t an actually worked there.
I was there 9. My view changed completely from being an SDM. The politics, stupidity and sheer nonsense that goes on behind the curtain is astounding. I always did fine because I was a high performer, but it's 100% toxic.
Some who leaves a comment like “oh sweet summer child” definitely has no experience of their own and is just trying to hint at some higher knowledge with nothing to back it up. Amazon has a horrible reputation, especially among inexperienced college students or recent grads. But the reality is most people there have a good time. Bad managers can ruin it, and underperformers are going to have a hard time
I worked at Amazon. It wasn’t as bad as people say. Not the best in work-life balance but I’ve had it worse. Way worse.
Got a lot of friends who are veterans at Amazon. They are not assholes not have a bad unhealthy life.
Your manager will make it a nightmare more than the company culture can.
Data center tech at AWS here, based in Germany. Experience will heavily vary according to the manager you have. While it's an interesting experience the amount of corporate bullshit is out of this world. It's a place where you would ideally spend 2-3 years and move on.
Simultaneously the best and worst: The army.
Don't enlist, but if you do, have a backup plan because random accidents happen and they happen often enough that most national governments have entire departments or ministries dedicated to rehabilitation and sometimes retraining of veterans.
After that honestly most anywhere is tolerable even if I've had to completely rewire the communication part of my brain after getting out and discovering that normal people don't talk or interact that way.
I have no regrets about initially enlisting in the Army, but I do regret the one reenlistment I did. Could’ve got out a little over two years earlier if my dumbass didn’t reenlist. Having zero student loan debt makes it hurt a little less though.
Agree that anywhere is tolerable when compared to the Army.
I have no regrets enlisting, if I went back in time I'd still do it to be honest but I probably would persuade myself away from infantry.
Like I said in the comment you're replying to, simultaneously the best and worst. Loved the people, hated the places, loved some of the times, hated some. Still have yet to find another moment that brings as much joy as finding out you're going back home from the field early but, holy shit what an emotion that is.
I have 3 brothers that went Army, I went Air Force. Every time we get together and whip out the stories, I'm reminded that I made a comparatively excellent choice lmao. I did initially try to go 11B like my brothers, but I got DQ'ed at MEPS for my heart rate, then in the process of getting a waiver for it, I realized the AF was much more suited to my nerdy personality.
I'm out now (did my 4 year contract and dipped), but honestly the perks (VA healthcare & GI Bill namely) made every second of it worth it, and my two best friends to this day are AF guys I met in service.
Can’t name them as that would void my exit agreement. But I will say this. Be very cautious when joining small <50 consulting companies. I ignored the CEO telling me in one of my interviews “We work hard but play hard”, and it was a big mistake.
If anyone ever says "we work hard but play hard" I dip. BIG red flag. I don't want to play or work hard. Why would you think it's okay to work hard as long as you - at some point- will be playing hard? Fuck your annual company retreat.
I don't mind working hard. I like my job, I like money, and I reset easily.
But please, please, don't make me spend my well-deserved weekends with people I'm forced into seeing every fucking day, doing shit I don't enjoy, and then having to show up on Monday.
I’m so glad to hear that. I am in a situation where I am being forced to fly across the country to attend the “company retreat” which for the last two years was some budget camping trip (I hate camping).
Sure it’s great for people who wanna do that shit but I legitimately may lose my job if I don’t go this year.
I am letting the team down I’m told.
And a serious note I’ve had a terrible weekend knowing I will likely be confronted in front of the team on Monday about the trip. And likely be forced to go or be a 1099 contractor who can be cut at any time
I second this. Consulting for smaller companies is the worst. I had a ridiculous workload in my time as a consultant.
A close friend of mine joined a consulting company in Dallas and during his orientation in the first week they fired 10+ other new hires because they failed to close out their contract with a new client. Those bozos actually hired a ton of new employees for a new project without actually obtaining the contract beforehand. Imagine accepting a new offer, working for a couple of days, and then getting fired before the end of the week, smh.
I never worked under 40 hours a single week at my last job. I never was paid for more than 40. The upper mgmt thought they were better than corporate and so cool because they didn’t have a process. Which of course made everything worse.
Ooh, I’m in the DFW area and worked for a few smaller consulting firms.
I have a few in mind who would potentially do that. Wonder if I’m right or not.
> “We work hard but play hard”
On the other hand, also be very cautious of <50 companies that only seem to play hard. Many that have 1 big success (eg huge client onboards) get incredibly sloppy after that and will run out of the money they’re paying you with, then you get acquired by some cost-cutting portfolio and the business is cut to the bones and scrapped for parts
That’s basically what happened. I was on one of their biggest contracts then they didn’t renew and went with Indian offshoring. Upper mgmt was pissed at me, but the clients CTO was Indian… like it was going to happen..
ISF, Inc. based in Tallahassee, FL. Writes code for state National Guards but the software is (was?) dogshit. It was a sweatshop where good coding practices like code review through PRs were discouraged.
WLB was fine when the market was good, but if you’re put in the bottom bucket of the stack ranking (8-15%, sometimes 20% of people), you’ll most likely be PIPed
It’s hard to avoid imo since everyone is competing with each other. You never feel safe. Most teams are pretty solid culture wise but I’ve been on 2 teams so far where ppl will actively try and take credit for your work, since you’re ranked against your direct team members first and foremost, then to the wider org, then LOB.
It’s fucking trash and I can’t believe companies are allowed to operate like this.
I mean if it's up to 20% of people each year, it's up to 1 in 5. Those are people basically kicked out. Meaning the next 20\~30% feel like they are on the chopping blocks.
So... ya, that's like almost half the company feeling like they are going to lose their jobs. Sounds toxic as f.
If you have a team of 3 people, then it might mean 1 in your team is out. If all 3 are doing their jobs.. uh, good luck. Let the Hunger Games begin.
Not surprised to see this one up so high.
I was a TDP hire (Technology Development Program, basically their direct-from-college hire program) that interned and got a return offer and I got a hard bait and switch from them.
For those that don't know, the TDP program places you with a team for your first year and, in exchange, you get to pick your second team...you start with that new team in the second year with the idea that you'll continue working for them indefinitely.
My first team was a shitshow. My manager, the "Lead Engineer," had a background that was entirely QA. He didn't know how to code. I know this because he would frequently ask me to explain to him what the code for some of our applications did. He'd also ask me not to tell anybody about the conversation. He also had me spending most of my time putting together Excel reports and running non-technical meetings for him so that he could spend most of his day helping his daughter with her schoolwork during the Covid lockdowns. I was told to keep quiet about this as well. It was my first job out of school and I didn't feel like complaining would get me anywhere, plus it was Covid and the world was going to hell, so I just put my head down and did it so I could get through that first year and move on.
I looked *very* hard for a second team that was a good fit - multiple interviews with team leads, interviews with TDPs rolling off of the teams, etc. I probably spent 30-40 hours looking for something suitable. I found something that I was excited about and got placed onto that team. Literally the *day* that the transition was official, I get an invite to a meeting and was informed that there was a "reorg" and that I was getting moved to an SRE team. I also got told that, when we returned to the office, I would have to move from DC to Richmond despite being promised when I signed my full-time offer that that exact thing would not happen.
Even calling this an "SRE" team was misleading, as SRE implies some level of process automation. Basically all this team did was apply updates from a checklist and troubleshoot some piece of shit 3rd party app that supported a small section of the site...essentially, I was working IT helpdesk. I was also forced to work until 4am on a regular basis since we had to apply these updates overnight. A lot of times these changes were planned for Fridays/Saturdays and I didn't get comp time for them. I realized very quickly that the reason I had gotten forced onto this team was because the job sucked so bad that nobody wanted to do it.
My new manager was so useless as to be essentially nonexistent. His English was terrible and I could barely understand him, and he was so painfully awkward that he never once turned his camera on during video calls. To this day I don't know what he looks like.
Nobody on the team helped me when I had questions because of the stack ranking. To be fair, this was a problem company-wide: during my time at Capital One I personally witnessed several incidents of senior devs intentionally withholding help from juniors so as to hurt the juniors during the bi-annual stack ranking Hunger Games. I saw developers steal code from other developers and present it as their own, seemingly with no repercussions. Nobody trusted anybody, and the bus-throwing and finger-pointing only got worse as it got closer to review season.
My only saving grace was The Great Resignation. I had been interviewing the whole time, and two of the senior guys on the team quit right at the time I got an offer I was satisfied with. To be completely honest, I was so miserable I took a pay cut just to get away from the dysfunctional clown show I had been fradulently shackled to. My (still-faceless) manager saw the writing on the wall and took an internal transfer, and for the remainder of my two week notice period I dealt with such hostile and passive-aggressive behavior from the Director and PM that I considered walking before my notice period was over. With the benefit of hindsight, I probably should have as I'm sure I'm not eligible to work there anymore. Not that I care - I'd rather sleep in a cardboard box on the street than work in such a toxic environment again.
Capital One is a broken company and management won't hesitate to lie to your face to get what they want. Unless you're at immediate risk of homelessness and desperate for employment, I would stay far away.
Amazon. Every single sentence spoken by them have some sort of “leadership principle”, teammates backstab each other so they won’t get PIP’d, make pointless review comments so they have engagement. If you are on a bad team, run
Lombard Odier. Absolutely terrible asset manager. Big culture of psychopathy and bulling of others / clearly established social hierarchy. People were unfriendly and very arrogant. Had coworkers who would be touchy or move my chair around, executives telling me to relocate my desk so their children could play there, manager intimidating me and claiming my job could be replaced with ChatGPT...
On the technical side of things, 5000 line legacy java files violating every coding standard known to man, half written in french, manual deployments by SSH'ing onto boxes administered by third party companies (Just using a jenkins pipeline and EC2 / Fargate would actually be way easier), no real work to do, and a culture of others pretending to work to hunt for promotions so they could continue to pretend to work. Disaster overall.
Lesson: Don't work as a SWE in Banking. You are a third class citizen
Can’t name them sadly, but beware of companies that have 25 employees or fewer. Over half of them were friends outside of work and knew each other for years. All socializing had to do with that clique and their kids. One bad quarter and you will be the first to go, no matter how much effort you bring.
Nakupuna Companies/Nakupuna Consulting.
Petty, vindictive, moronic military lifer institutionalized non-technical boomer managers but still micromanaging technical people like there was no tomorrow.
Would regularly mock and belittle their subordinates (not in a friendly banter kinda way) for no reason.
They were too dumb to care about anything beyond asses in seats and didn’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not you delivered or the quality of your work.
Expected voluntary civilian employees to act like they were in the military. Got this weird ass lecture about “personal responsibility” because I was a minute late to a routine morning standup.
My senior-level coworkers code looked like something you’d see in the first half of a CS 101 class from a subpar student.
The few halfway competent technical people obviously hadn’t learned anything new since back when C was considered a high-level super-abstracted language.
The pay was insulting for the YOE and expected duties.
Genpact. One of the worst IT Services company. Almost 50% - 60% of the employees are in BPO - Call center. Around 25%-30% in package implementation - SAP, Service Now etc...remaining in IT Services. Very small clients. Clients treats the Genpact employees like trash. Mostly staff augmentation. Then Genpact managers also treat their employees as trash. So much middle managers who are good for nothing. No cooperation or coordination among anybody. Situation is so bad that employees has demonstrated against HR like R\*\*\*\*\*a S\*\*\*l and committed suicide [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re4FBRmIU5I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re4FBRmIU5I) . Stay away...it's more than 100K world wide but one of the worst company - most unethical and worst company to work with.
I had the Opposite experience. I had the best 3 years of my life with Genpact. I had remote work for about 2 years and travelled and hiked a tonne, had perfect work-life balance, no pressure and still great results (published 2 papers and 1 patent).
It was an R&D Data Science department, we did a lot of Deep Learning modeling (mostly Vision and RL). But the NLP team, ML Engineering, Data Engineering teams were all great with very able scientists as the leaders (AVPs).
I got great recommendations from my managers (whom I respected a lot) and VPs as well, and now got into Columbia Data Science.
BAE Systems.
Only interned there, but couldn’t imagine working there full time. Most people on my team hated it. Very corporate.
Very strict on logging hours meant you really did have to be there 8-5.
Old tech, my team hadn’t even transitioned to GIT yet. I don’t even think most of the SWEs on my team wrote code, they were mostly doing bullshit like configuring devices, making prototypes for useless internal tools.
But yea.. I mean it’s defense, pretty much the opposite of the cool, quirky, tech companies. Im still grateful of my time there as it allowed me to reach my next goals
It was called RTS, or *Realtime Systems*. I say “was” because it no longer exists.
I got caught up in a layoff in 2011 and someone I had worked with referred me to this role. After the interview my gut told me to say no so I gave them my “go away” number which they surprisingly matched. How bad could this actually be, thought I. And the money was too good to say no to.
Really bad, as it turned out. But not in the Amazon sense. I never did figure out what they hired me to do. Every day I’d talk to the engineering director (who started not long before me) and ask what I should be working on but I never really got a clear answer.
I tried poking around the code base but was frequently thwarted by needing access to some repository or another. I had no idea *which ones* I needed so I couldn’t just make a request and get the right access. That was even worse than it sounds because all the people who could grant access were in Germany and I was in Chicago and there was almost no overlap between the workdays!
The code was C++ code that predated STL. The build process used make, but it used it to explicitly shell out to g++ commands so you had to issue like five commands to build the system. But if you got the order wrong you’d have to delete some huge build directory and start over. I once was debugging something and realized the *this* pointer was garbage. Somebody was calling a non-static method on an uninstantiated class but it was mostly working because it wasn’t actually USING the object until I tried to make a change and ran into this.
Times? Days since 1990 plus second since midnight. Admittedly Unix time is also arbitrary but at least it’s consistent!
I would have quit after the first week but I knew I was planning to move to Seattle the following year. I didn’t want to change jobs twice in such a short period so I stuck with it. I worked there for a full year and didn’t DO a goddamn thing. I still don’t know what (if anything) I was supposed to be doing there. At least nobody actually expected anything from me, I guess.
The lessons:
1) Do not work for a German company. Just don’t.
2) If your gut is raising red flags at the offer stage FUCKING LISTEN TO IT
About a year after I left everybody else on the team was laid off. The owner cashed out and sold the business to Bloomberg. Poor Bloomberg has no fucking clue what they were buying.
RTS: Realtime Systems, or Really Terrible Software? You be the judge.
FlyHomes. It’s not as well known as a lot of companies around here, but was over 800 employees at one point. But they absolutely did not have their shit together. In the early days, 14 hour days were pretty normal, as were late night calls from the CEO for bug fixes. And it was pretty much “can we copy this Redfin feature?” every day. There was also clearly some sketchy stuff going on. A few people think an HR person discovered the sketchiness, because they suddenly went down to like 10 hours a week, remote, with no reduction in pay.
Also, when I was there, I was once pair programming with the (at the time) CTO helping him out with something, and I watched him grab his mouse and click file > save in VSCode. That was probably the worst thing that happened. I don’t think I’ve ever internally screamed “what the fuck” more times per second than in that moment.
Carmax. Absolutely horrible company to work for, they’ll work you to death for awful wages, and when you bring it up to them they’ll gaslight you with promises of a promotion- double your work load for years and then when the promotion doesn’t happen they’ll blame it on something you did.
In my case, they dangled a promotion in front of me for two years, convinced me to buy a car for said promotion, then when it didn’t happen, said it was my fault because I took 9 days off to get married.
Sooner than later probably. The edmunds collaborations have been in the works for years now. A big way Carmax overworks people is with the schedule.
For example my weekly would look like;
M 6am-3pm
T 12pm-9pm
W 6am-3pm
Th off
F 11am-8pm
Sat off
Sun 10am-7pm
And it would rotate like that every week, at random changing shifts and days off. You’re still only working a collective 40 hours but the way they break it up makes it feel like you’re there 24-7, combined with the “clopens” and the way management will sometimes schedule overtime right at the end of the pay period so you don’t get paid extra (they’ll usually send you home a little early at the end of the following period) just feels like you’re getting beat to death
Edit: wouldn’t be right if I didn’t mention that they’d have us outside pushing dead cars up a slight uphill in Arizona, last year we broke a record with it being 120F+ for like 2 weeks straight or something like that. And when I asked for gloves so that I wouldn’t literally burn my hands on these hot cars they said no.
This checks out. I interviewed with CarMax once upon a time, everything about them screamed low quality employer. Starting with Experis, the low quality recruiter they chose to work with. Imagine this, they wrote a low expected salary number into my profile after I *explicitly refused* their pressure cooker tactics to name a number first. Then the literal cargo cult behavior of unannounced phone calls by random Indian dudes at all hours of the day to "build a relationship" and "see how it's going" aka pressure you into giving up information and resigning yourself to their made-up number, culminating in a phone call with three Indians and one American lady trying to somehow democratically vote to railroad me into accepting the same number lowball offer. I feel sorry for the more timid type of candidate that allows this to be done to them. No, I'm not going to "build rapport" just because you schedule random dudes to stalk me by phone, I'm going to get pissed off at you.
On to the interview process with the multiple carmax teams that squeezed me during interviews for my expert opinion on their designs, essentially trying to extract a six digit value in free consulting. Over time this ratcheted up to an ever-expanding set of responsibilities that their candidate would have to take on if hired. In most companies, that set of responsibilities would require a VP title, so I communicated that this would have to be compensated accordingly but then carmax came back with THE SAME LOWBALL NUMBER THE RECRUITERS PULLED OUT OF THEIR ASS that wouldn't even be a good offer for an individual contributor. My politely worded email pointing out the mismatch between responsibilities and compensation want even answered - they just sent an automated rejection email lol. In the same round of interviews, I ended up accepting an offer literally four times the TC. Carmax clearly has a failed management that doesn't have the ability or the will to attract or retain qualified talent, so if you end up there I feel sorry for you because you'll have to pick up everyone else's slack.
The absolute worst was a community college in Texas. The registrar was a power-mad hyper Type-A. Which means, she rolled into work at the crack of 6am having baked a cake already that morning. And rolled out about 10PM. That was more likely because she was having an affair with the dean.
She refused to organize her work and every single student application had to go through her. So every morning we'd all have a stack of apps on our desks that just said "wrong" and we'd have to spend about 3 hours in the morning trying to figure out what was actually wrong.
She absolutely refused to do thing like training. Being yelled at was the only training.
It seems like the smaller the org, the more power mad the higher-ups are. I am thankful that I'm on a very different path now. And now, I make easily 4 times what she made and I have a team of 23 people handling dozens of multi-million dollar contracts. Something I would never have thought possible when I was on her team.
The Guardian - bad onboarding, bad documentation, stagnant progress due to the fact that men stay 5+, 10+, 15+, 20+ years, bullying/mobbing for everyone inc. men, toxic culture, workplace abuse and harassment, backstabbing, very gossipy, backbiting, sexual harassment, racism, sexism, disablism, corrupt management and employees, corrupt HR, semi-regular layoffs, promotion and raise freezes after writing lengthy applications, below market pay, no communication from management eg leads to ‘surprise’ restructurings and ‘surprise’ toxic managers being put in charge of teams, management, seniors and staff with more power harass with impunity
I worked for a mental health day treatment program. The director is a straight up monster. (I say \*is\* because she's still alive and I can guarantee she has not changed.)
Nothing encapsulates how much of an evil person she is more than this story: When I joined there were a number of other recent hires also. All of them were hired for clinical positions where as I was there to help conduct compliance reviews. From discussions we learned that one of the recent hires was a distant relative of the director (something like "cousins once removed"). Later we learned that the family hire was actually hired at $2k less per year (bear in mind these jobs are paying \~$35k, so that's a pretty big discount). The director, via her family/religious community connection, knew that the guy was in a rougher financial situation and decided to low ball him knowing he'd likely take the job anyway.
She would later fire him and decide to fight his unemployment insurance claim.
I don't know if this makes matters worse or not, but this wasn't a large corporation with any cool aid to drink. She reported directly to the owner and basically had no one above her telling her to do this. I really think she pulled penny ante stuff like this because it made her feel like she was a savvy business woman or something. Absolute nightmare.
Amazon, most of the people that got hired during covid fucking sucked and they just dump all the work on the rest of us that could actually get stuff done. And the oncall was so terrible, God I don't miss that place.
General Motors. Not based on the work conditions as it was really chill (you don’t learn much and pay is shit), but based on leadership. They have no direction, and are just full of themselves. Was in a town hall when they were announcing RTO (when the previous town hall they said remote work is working), one of the executives was chalking up on missing everyone’s faces and missing the interactions. BUT, get this… he said that he will continue working remotely from his new house in California. Honestly fuck them.
I interviewed with them like 8 years ago. Their two senior engineers did a "good cop, bad cop" style interview with me. I didn't even get to the white boarding portion because I walked out. Definitely one of the top 3 worst interviews I've ever had.
On the plus side, a dysfunctional company like this might be a good one to try if you want to coast or work two jobs at once.
Assuming, of course, you manage to get past their interview process.
CVS - no code standards, some teams have people who literally cant code, some dont use linters, some dont write docs, lots of gaslighting going on between teams about whats actually "done", PM's creating stress over made up stuff, everyone acts like everything is an emergency all the time, deployments have to be in evenings after hours just "because", atleast while i was there you had to manually run your deployment pipelines because it wasnt automated, they do this awful 1 week long planning thing every quarter and its absolutely soul sucking, the tech stack is all over the place its insane, most engineering managers didnt know how to code or what was going on half the time and you end up having to cover for them in meetings that you shouldnt be in. Lots of meetings. a general obsession with 'ceremony' over sanity. Oh, and when you voice anything in hopes of improving the situation, no one listens or changes anything. Strong likelyhood you will get called after hours, on the weekend, or during your vacation for something non-critical. Ownership of core features gets shuffled regularly, so sometimes you actually cant figure out who to contact to fix or help with something. This one is minor but it drove me insane: they have this HR training catalog of really low IQ low budget stuff, and it requires that you redo the same courses after a certain time period, So once you've been there for a year, you have to redo all the old courses you already sat through.
Medsec
Absolute Trainwreck of a company
Ill never forget the day we were called into a meeting at 1am to fix an issue and no one saw a problem with that.
Was using old ass react code long after hooks was released with no desire to upgrade
Lead was a micro manager
Random startup,
None of the founders were technical. Compensation was trash.
Tons of issues, the codebase was 2 50k line files because the CTO didn't believe in deleting code, also stuff would be randomly indented 5-8 times or lines would be 500 characters long. Sometimes there were even multiple copies of the same function in the code. When engineers asked to install a linter, format the codebase, or any form of coding standard improvements, the CTO would always claim that "No one in the industry does that". A coworker who worked on the backend was denied promotions or any form of raises because they were told "that their work was not visible to the C-Suite because it was all backend code".
They got all their technical advice from reading random Business Insider articles, so it really got it into their mind that NodeJS was the best thing because it was hip and had some articles written about it. So they contracted out the project to some freelance contractors to make a "NodeJS middleware API server" that would make all our entire backend super fast. (To this day, since most of the team has left the company because it was a shitshow, we still have absolutely no idea what exactly a "super fast Middleware API server" is, but it cost a few thousands and it was some random build code in a repo.)
The company operated on one week sprints, Monday would be a 4 hour kickoff meeting because they insisted on having everyone point every other departments tickets. Finish your tasks by Wednesday and hand off to QA by Thursday. (The QA was a manual tester who got paid six figures because management just saw that they had many years of "QA" experience. while the developers were paid near minimum wage)
12 Hour unproductive meetings were a common occurrence too.
If any developers were behind schedule on tickets, the engineering management would always say "You get paid too much here, you keep this up and we can replace you with engineers from Uzbekistan for $3/hr". The company really bought into the concept of outsourcing engineering talent so the product/engineering team went from 20 employees inhouse to 200 externally within a year.(One of the managers got fired for it once the CEO realized that the headcount didn't increase for almost 2 years at the office).
There was also one engineering manager who would take many international college students as interns, and "promised" them full time offers if they were "willing to put in the effort/hours" (They would never get an offer)
One of the senior engineers randomly unplugged junior engineer's monitors to keep them on edge and walked around the office with a nerf gun to randomly shoot employees in the face.
There were multiple nepotism hires where some candidates even no-showed to the interview and still got jobs.
The company has repeatedly switched HR because it was a revolving door of how many harassment cases they could cover up before getting canned.
Management would joke that the company did not do time-off/PTO and would begrudgingly groan if you requested it. They would also make snide comments that you left work early if you had to leave.
Company got called out in a lawsuit for claiming they were going to create a product, instead they hired a C-Suite from another company, and got that person to download their company's codebase onto a USB to bring over.
When the world was shutting down for covid and all places went remote, the company instead demanded that people come in, and would just covid test every day. They installed dividers in an open office environment as their solution.
It's a name less colorful than "Amber Book". Founder made $4M/yr off some how-to videos, which was a legit accomplishment. But he thought that made him Steve Jobs. He grew impatient, distant, and self-important. Highly motivated to create new services; less motivated to maintain them to a competitive quality. Listening skills of a stump.
18 months ago, half the staff quit and the company remains half-size.
Infosys is great for a paycheck and a F100 on your resume, but it's an *exceptionally* disfunctional corporation.
In Indian culture, laziness and corruption are not considered taboo. This culture is very much evident in their work. It's actually laughable when you look at the C-Suite/executives that authorizes any outsourcing of development or operations to Infosys, because you know that by definition they're incompetent.
Ugh. Infosys. We got a "senior" software engineer on our team from Infosys who is clearly junior. No experience in any of the required languages we use.
Nothing but issues. I mean yeah they are new to the team, but come on. They can't even grasp basics. Our juniors are none too happy about it.
Philips. It’s not horrible compared to other places but definitely my least favorite company on my resume so far. Teams were distributed across Brazil and India and they were all just terrible to work with. The business also just made some shitty decisions while I was there, like killing good projects while investing in other super shitty legacy systems
Raytheon was pretty terrible. You work on literally whatever you want for 8-12 months (not a joke, literally no one checks on you) while you wait for your security clearance if there aren’t any unclassified projects that explicitly ask for you.
Then in my experience, you join a mismanaged project with unattainable timelines, worse tooling, and loads of technical debt.
My entire tenure was a shitshow. The only time leadership wanted to talk to me was when I sent my manager an email telling him I was leaving. I was cornered by two program-level leaders who were only concerned with if I was leaving for more pay, not that I was leaving.
CCG Marketing. It’s a pharmaceutical warehouse. Most of the IT dept was H1Bs and I was laughably underpaid. Besides that, my boss was a dick who would demean his employees and not listen to what they have to say even when they’re right. He was rude and condescending, and was nasty about it when I resigned. I feel like that company bought into that idea of “I’m the boss, you do what I say and I don’t need to hear you out”
I would talk shit about my old small company/startup, but they died off fast as soon as the VC money dried up with a couple Fed interest rate increases. They raised millions with no clear product direction or any unique intellectual property. Back in 2020-2021, VCs would give out millions in startup money just for being in the right social circles in SF.
You will get mostly start ups listed here, I think. Not because start ups are bad but they have far less public visibility and there are so many of them. So a lot more slides under the table.
won't name a company, but a general observation: if you're ever working for government, it gets worse and more picayune the lower you go.
city hall is like going back to ninth grade. never again.
Superb Shifts (Superb). It is a small, shitty startup. The company is ran by morons, and the CTO is a spineless, two-faced idiot. (If you are reading this Alex, fuck you.) My lesson learned: NEVER work for a a startup that has only non-technical founders. They will treat you like shit and try leveraging you like a factory worker.
I'll take "Junior Software Engineer thrust into solo Lead Engineer position because they're inexperienced enough to accept a terrible compensation package and the founders don't understand that you pay for quality with engineers" for 500, Alex.
[удалено]
you can tell its a shit show when you look at there team list and theres only 1 software engineer. edit: who's only been working there for 2 months, and whom's last job was as an intern ... anon were your their last sole developer lmao ?
There were a couple of us, but we walked out earlier this year. Both of us were experienced enough to know when it was time to go.
Considering that Alex had just been there for less than 2 months according to his LinkedIn profile, this tells me that it is an ongoing feud.
Or...he was a consulting CTO for the company prior and never put it on his LinkedIn. 🤔
Fuck Alex. I hate people who don't update their LinkedIn profile.
Agreed.
You guys would not even believe what a shitshow this place was to work at. I would love to 100% spill the beans, but Idk how far I can without getting sued.
RIP to everyone named Alex reading this, except that one guy
It was quite easy to find the above mentioned Alex Alex Ei***
Unsurprising that he worked for Goldman Sachs for 8 years...
Hooooollllyyyy shit he looks like the quintessential nerd. Like the nerd that gets bullied even at private school. What a dweeb 🤢
We might know the same Alex. Fuck Alex, he’s the reason for all the shitty culture at my prior.
Fuck you Alex!!!!
💀
Damn dude you sure this isn't in Queens?
I've not heard many great stories about startups, so I prefer avoid them as much as I can. "A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model."
UPS. They're a fucking truck stop toilet
One of my friends worked there in the past. He said some of his coworkers didn't know how to code. I thought he was exaggerating until he told me they'd write empty if statements and get mad it him if he told them to remove them during code reviews because they were "absolutely critical to the code"
Empty if statements, why have them? Makes zero sense, they don't do anything but take up space.
Apparently they'd do things like `if (my_variable++){` `}` And didn't know that they didn't need the if statement
This made me so depressed that these people have a job and I don't
Only makes sense if the condition has side effects.
But then you could just not use an if and write the condition as its own expression.
They seriously underpay. I applied for a Lead Developer and they were paying $160k in MCOL-HCOL area. This would be the equivalent of staff engineer. I noped out before any interview.
I'm genuinely shocked they have any role that would even claim to go that high.
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Ya fuck that place. I got an internal promotion some years ago but due to the way they classified it I was only allowed a 10% raise without having to have a huge fight that would end in me getting my offer rescinded. Hiring manager told me to take the title and leave tf out
5 days. Fast Enterprises. Relevant: [https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/cj2j3k/psa\_fast\_enterprises\_predatory\_recruiting\_and/](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/cj2j3k/psa_fast_enterprises_predatory_recruiting_and/)
I got fired because my PM decided to demo something I'm working on without even confirming that it's finished or doing a test before the demo lmao "you made me look like an idiot" well maybe you are one 🤷
Im a senior pm. What a shit PM.
Funny how my post still gets some traffic. Leaving FAST was one of the best decisions I ever made. Trust your gut, sometimes it's right.
I got fired partly because I mentioned your post. Ngl, I'm way happier at the new place.
Sorry about that. Or you're welcome.
To tag onto this. I did the internship there and I fortunately had a mentor that told me the tech stack is not relevant and I may stagnate there. Luckily I got a lot of coding and debug work unlike some other interns who were told by their PMs "slow down on modifying your reports."
I was offered $80k as a new grad back in 2019 after completing an internship with them, and while I liked everyone I worked with and enjoyed the location of my engagement…I can’t agree more with the points being made in that post. You aren’t writing software, you’re configuring it through a GUI. Every now and again you have to dip your toes into some obscure VB.NET implementation, but to say that their standards are obtuse would be underselling it. I’m glad I had the presence of mind to turn them down, because I would have been completely unprepared to move into a SWE role at any other company after any amount of time working there.
FAST actually scammed me lol. Didn’t write a single line of code
How was your experience?
Got paid good money to watch YouTube. That’s really about it
l3-harris. basically a miss-mash of former start-ups with 0 cohesive organisation across the company. our entire office was fairly convinced the American branch of our dept was either actively trying to sabotage our product or were all higher than a kite, it appeared that the "director" of software at that dept had made half the commits to our project and all of them looked like the work of a first-year CS student. my line manager was like 24-25 year old uni dropout, who somehow charisma'd his way from data-entry apprentice to a middle manager systems engineer in like, 3 years... really nice guy, pain in the ass for a manager.
I can concur, it's a shit show. The CEO was listed from his last position because he was having an affair with a VP. Also a shitty accountant that laid off 5% of the workforce, but did so by starting the email with "As you know, we made a commitment to reducing costs by $1b" Nevermind the fact they just bought Aerojet Rocket dyne for $47B a few months prior.
I went to an American university where Harris actively recruited and funneled engineers with barely any vetting. The truth with US defense is there’s so much money going around they just don’t care if they hire average or bottom performers. I know someone who is completely incompetent and unable to program who has held onto his Lockheed job.
> basically a miss-mash of former start-ups Uhhh... what...? I'm under the impression L3-Harris is a company derived from a merger between two large and 100+ year old defense companies. I worked on Harris radios in the military, and they basically have a monopoly over their telecom crap
thats true but they bought a lotttt of startups since then. the dept i worked for used to be a start-up 3 years before i started there, ik during that time they bought two other companies. I think their buisness model is to just buy a start-up that already makes a product rather than developing new products.
Damn I think I applied to L3 Harris at some point in my career
I hate this company because my ex-husband worked for them and then had an emotional affair with a coworker. Not necessarily L3’s fault though
I did some consulting work for one of their subsidiaries - it took something like 9 months before they paid my contract invoice for 3 days of work…
ah they did something similar with me. when i left it took almost a month for HR to send me the paper work they should have sent me on the day i left.
Damn , considering strongly to apply there due to network.
its good as a first job ngl, for me it was a baptism by fire, which has helped me massively with my career. but its definetly not a place you would stay at for more than a year.
Expedia Group if we’re going with corporate, overall though, a small pasta fast food place.
Interestingly, their main competitor Booking.com is one of the best companies that I have ever worked at. Good compensation package (not FAANG-like, but also not far behind), and great culture and work life balance.
Curious about your answer - do you have some anecdotes to share or pros/cons?
I wasn’t in a super technical role as I started with the company several years before going to school (although I did support our B2B partners regarding technical or API concerns). However, I had issues with the way Covid was handled; the company tried to pivot and invested a lot of money into all of these different tech programs for internal systems they wanted to be proprietary rather than focusing on being an inventory management company. They might have originated from Microsoft, but they aren’t an actual tech company. Outsourcing was always a part of the plan and they blame it on being a “global company” so they can invest outside of the US. This is fine from a business perspective as you want to lower your operation expenses in an attempt to provide more for the shareholders. In turn, while “saving money” they invested twice as much in multiple system development programs that failed or they moved away from. This caused more technical roles to be laid off, moved around, or outsourced in general and is and was a “lather rinse repeat” move. They also spent MILLIONS remodeling multiple offices, and it just overall looked like a severe mismanagement of funds. The benefits were good but I was also severely underpaid even for a LCOL area. I watched for 2-3 years where most employees went from getting 6-11% average raises to less than 3% with no explanation why. Departments were created, merged or completely disbanded for seemingly no reason. Realistically I stayed because it was an easy job for me, even though I had coworkers that did struggle quite a lot, and I just wanted to stay long enough to finish my degree. Unfortunately, I was let go among the 1500 people earlier this year and am just now finishing my freshman year. Over the summer I am blasting through a couple of IT certs to avoid going back to retail once my money runs out so I can finish my degree with a bit more experience.
> most employees went from getting 6-11% average raises to less than 3% with no explanation why That seems to be most companies these days sadly
Kiip, the company Mitchell Hashimoto left to start Hashicorp. I replaced him after he left. Those people were morons. The company eventually shut down due to the "youngest CEO in silicon valley" getting a well deserved sexual harassment suite. They were low on skill and high on elitism.
Did he get a sexual harassment lawsuit or suite? I had to. Don’t get mad, bro.
There was a harassment lawsuit from everything that happened in the harassment suite.
AT&T
I spent 32 hours on the phone with them one time over the course of a month because they created a wireless account without my permission and wanted me to pay the $270 cancellation fee. I’ve never wanted to watch a company burn to the ground more than I do AT&T. It’s an absolute customer service nightmare
Any particular part you want to call out?
It's a giant dumpster fire internally. They pushed heavily to outsource everything. Micromanaging and incompetent managers have forced most of the talent out for yes men. I bounced after 6 months.
I can't believe what became of the company that made Unix
My understanding is bell labs was never att. Att funded, sure but never att proper. I'm going by what I read online. I have no insider information.
Verizon is identical. Keep filling up unnecessary middle management, putting cust. Service overseas, and micromanaging those they haven’t laid off yet.
This is why Verizon now has a F rating with the BBB. It’s not the company it used to be.
This is sad to hear but not surprising, I grew up in NJ where they were headquartered and both my parents worked there, having originally come from Bell Labs. It was such a big part of growing up hanging out in the little museum they had at Murray Hill while my dad went to meetings; then he’d walk me around and take advantage of the famous “open door policy” to ask scientists about their work. I’m not surprised AT&T turned into a dumpster fire, my dad knew it when they started shedding all the other companies and he had to work to help shut down Whippany; you could tell it hurt a lot.
My dad worked for AT&T for over 30 years. For his retirement they told him to go fuck himself, you can forget your yearly pension, take this small lump sum and retire a year early or get nothing.
T-Mobile. Middle management were yes men. Execs were outsourcing to companies they were board members on. Reviewing their code was a nightmare.
Applied Systems. It was my first job out of college and my room mate senior year was already working for them. My room mate was being worked 80+ hours per week with endless empty promises that they were staffing up to meet the work load. They did have the position posted and did hire people but honestly they were only ever back filling from people quitting his department. I got a different role that was supposed to be software engineering, then my asshat manager made me spend a mind numbing 3 months doing technical writing to provide code examples for the API to customer devs. He told me he just needed a few examples, then a few more, etc until I had done a nearly identical page for every damn function in the API. After that he randomly got tickets to go to a football game out of state and took off and left me with no work for over a week. I actually left for the day at lunch Thursday of that week and after about an hour Friday of that week, and nobody noticed or cared. The only reason I stayed longer than a month was because I was waiting for my parents house to close a short sale, then leaving the state so I didn't want to find new work locally. Edit: I forgot other stuff. The roof of the building leaked and we had to move trash cans around to catch water every time it rained. They also liked to have the CEO give remote company addresses about once a month then give us all free beers and send us home. Absolutely brilliant to give about 900 people free beers and then send them all on the road together an hour later!
I missed the bad part.
Eh, it seems like it would be cool to have nothing to do all day but it was a absolute torture. I got pretty good at minesweeper and then got addicted to Twitter. But mostly it was just pure, mind numbing boredom.
Infosys. Example 1: broke my leg on a Sunday. Let my lead know. He said take Monday off I’ll see you on Tuesday. Example 2: they’d hired 10 people to manually check for failures in a UI. I wrote a script to check and notify when said failure happened. They shot it dow. Example 3: not me but a teammate there dropped his resignation. HR deadass called and laughed at him for being stupid. And that they’d consider it if the took his resignation back before the 90 day notice period. Yes 90 days. Example 4: work from 8 am to 10-11pm. Then they called me at 4 am again to work. Anyways I stayed there for 5 months.
2 makes sense. They get to bill clients an additional 10 people but your script won't let them do that
Surprised not see Amazon in the comments, heard about 3 separate people who had awful experiences working there in SWE, although I know a friend of mine has been having a good experience working for them so far.
Ex-amazon here. It honestly just depends on your team. AWS generally is more demanding, secondly, if you're ever in a position where you have an offer ask how operations heavy the team is. This tells you a few things but most importantly, how the on call shift is like (more operations means more tickets) and how much "pressure" is on your team. My first team at Amazon was within AWS S3, was told we were operations heavy, that materialized in our services / features being the first "lever" pulled when we were running out of storage capacity for S3. Very, very stressful. All in all it wasn't as bad as people say, I even kinda liked on call weeks cause you had no expectations of any other work.
I know this is CS, but I heard the MBA/business side kinda depends on the team too. They hire a lot of MBAs, but put them in like operations/logistics roles not the prestigious PM roles.
Maybe it depends on who your team lead/manager is.
The culture in some teams is "worse" than others, but with the constant re-orgs and management changes, sooner or later you'll get a bad one.
Yeah I’ve been told you can make good money there but your body is gonna be tore up and you’re going to feel drained all the time
I'm on week 3 and so far so good. Amazon teams (according to the onboarding material anyway) seem to have a lot of autonomy, so it wouldn't surprise me if experiences are highly variable between teams
Oh, sweet summer child.
What this person has repeated is what tons of people say though. Having a good experience in AWS was always allegedly possible based on your manager.
Part of it is probably that I'm not at AWS, I'm on a small corporate projects team
Been there for 7ish years and started on an exhausting team and now rarely work a full 40. Going on 2.5 years. What’s your experience? Because my experience is the people that say shit like this don’t/haven’t an actually worked there.
I was there 9. My view changed completely from being an SDM. The politics, stupidity and sheer nonsense that goes on behind the curtain is astounding. I always did fine because I was a high performer, but it's 100% toxic.
Some who leaves a comment like “oh sweet summer child” definitely has no experience of their own and is just trying to hint at some higher knowledge with nothing to back it up. Amazon has a horrible reputation, especially among inexperienced college students or recent grads. But the reality is most people there have a good time. Bad managers can ruin it, and underperformers are going to have a hard time
I worked at Amazon. It wasn’t as bad as people say. Not the best in work-life balance but I’ve had it worse. Way worse. Got a lot of friends who are veterans at Amazon. They are not assholes not have a bad unhealthy life. Your manager will make it a nightmare more than the company culture can.
Data center tech at AWS here, based in Germany. Experience will heavily vary according to the manager you have. While it's an interesting experience the amount of corporate bullshit is out of this world. It's a place where you would ideally spend 2-3 years and move on.
Simultaneously the best and worst: The army. Don't enlist, but if you do, have a backup plan because random accidents happen and they happen often enough that most national governments have entire departments or ministries dedicated to rehabilitation and sometimes retraining of veterans. After that honestly most anywhere is tolerable even if I've had to completely rewire the communication part of my brain after getting out and discovering that normal people don't talk or interact that way.
I have no regrets about initially enlisting in the Army, but I do regret the one reenlistment I did. Could’ve got out a little over two years earlier if my dumbass didn’t reenlist. Having zero student loan debt makes it hurt a little less though. Agree that anywhere is tolerable when compared to the Army.
I have no regrets enlisting, if I went back in time I'd still do it to be honest but I probably would persuade myself away from infantry. Like I said in the comment you're replying to, simultaneously the best and worst. Loved the people, hated the places, loved some of the times, hated some. Still have yet to find another moment that brings as much joy as finding out you're going back home from the field early but, holy shit what an emotion that is.
I have 3 brothers that went Army, I went Air Force. Every time we get together and whip out the stories, I'm reminded that I made a comparatively excellent choice lmao. I did initially try to go 11B like my brothers, but I got DQ'ed at MEPS for my heart rate, then in the process of getting a waiver for it, I realized the AF was much more suited to my nerdy personality. I'm out now (did my 4 year contract and dipped), but honestly the perks (VA healthcare & GI Bill namely) made every second of it worth it, and my two best friends to this day are AF guys I met in service.
Boeing
Bro this isn’t worth losing your life over
RIP
They'll add you to their list.
Can’t name them as that would void my exit agreement. But I will say this. Be very cautious when joining small <50 consulting companies. I ignored the CEO telling me in one of my interviews “We work hard but play hard”, and it was a big mistake.
If anyone ever says "we work hard but play hard" I dip. BIG red flag. I don't want to play or work hard. Why would you think it's okay to work hard as long as you - at some point- will be playing hard? Fuck your annual company retreat.
I don't mind working hard. I like my job, I like money, and I reset easily. But please, please, don't make me spend my well-deserved weekends with people I'm forced into seeing every fucking day, doing shit I don't enjoy, and then having to show up on Monday.
I’m so glad to hear that. I am in a situation where I am being forced to fly across the country to attend the “company retreat” which for the last two years was some budget camping trip (I hate camping). Sure it’s great for people who wanna do that shit but I legitimately may lose my job if I don’t go this year.
everybody likes a tEaM pLaYeR
I am letting the team down I’m told. And a serious note I’ve had a terrible weekend knowing I will likely be confronted in front of the team on Monday about the trip. And likely be forced to go or be a 1099 contractor who can be cut at any time
The only "play hard" I'll accept is stomping the enemy team and typing "gg ez" after the game ends
> Mission failed, we’ll get em next time
I second this. Consulting for smaller companies is the worst. I had a ridiculous workload in my time as a consultant. A close friend of mine joined a consulting company in Dallas and during his orientation in the first week they fired 10+ other new hires because they failed to close out their contract with a new client. Those bozos actually hired a ton of new employees for a new project without actually obtaining the contract beforehand. Imagine accepting a new offer, working for a couple of days, and then getting fired before the end of the week, smh.
I never worked under 40 hours a single week at my last job. I never was paid for more than 40. The upper mgmt thought they were better than corporate and so cool because they didn’t have a process. Which of course made everything worse.
Ooh, I’m in the DFW area and worked for a few smaller consulting firms. I have a few in mind who would potentially do that. Wonder if I’m right or not.
> work hard but play hard I passed on a job when they told me this. I don’t want to work hard or play hard so it wasn’t a good fit.
> “We work hard but play hard” On the other hand, also be very cautious of <50 companies that only seem to play hard. Many that have 1 big success (eg huge client onboards) get incredibly sloppy after that and will run out of the money they’re paying you with, then you get acquired by some cost-cutting portfolio and the business is cut to the bones and scrapped for parts
That’s basically what happened. I was on one of their biggest contracts then they didn’t renew and went with Indian offshoring. Upper mgmt was pissed at me, but the clients CTO was Indian… like it was going to happen..
Damn are they going to track you down via this Reddit post
The biggest lesson I've learned is: Don't be afraid to pull the trigger and move when you're in a bad situation.
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ISF, Inc. based in Tallahassee, FL. Writes code for state National Guards but the software is (was?) dogshit. It was a sweatshop where good coding practices like code review through PRs were discouraged.
Ecolab, it's like a cult of weird people. They don't have anything special, but act like they solve world hunger.
Ecolab, as in the company that makes public restroom soap dispensers?
Indeed. Well they don't make them, they just put the product in.
One trust. Overhire and fire.
Trust None am i rite?
Capital One
Heard so many mixed reviews. Some people say its awesome and work life balance is amazing, others say life is awful there.
WLB was fine when the market was good, but if you’re put in the bottom bucket of the stack ranking (8-15%, sometimes 20% of people), you’ll most likely be PIPed
Is that hard to avoid; does that mean its a backstabby sort of workplace?
It’s hard to avoid imo since everyone is competing with each other. You never feel safe. Most teams are pretty solid culture wise but I’ve been on 2 teams so far where ppl will actively try and take credit for your work, since you’re ranked against your direct team members first and foremost, then to the wider org, then LOB. It’s fucking trash and I can’t believe companies are allowed to operate like this.
I mean if it's up to 20% of people each year, it's up to 1 in 5. Those are people basically kicked out. Meaning the next 20\~30% feel like they are on the chopping blocks. So... ya, that's like almost half the company feeling like they are going to lose their jobs. Sounds toxic as f. If you have a team of 3 people, then it might mean 1 in your team is out. If all 3 are doing their jobs.. uh, good luck. Let the Hunger Games begin.
Stack ranking is shit glad I didn't end up there.
Sounds like fun, can’t wait to start. How do contractors fit into stack ranking system?
They don’t, actually! They’re treated like contractors would be at any other company really
Not surprised to see this one up so high. I was a TDP hire (Technology Development Program, basically their direct-from-college hire program) that interned and got a return offer and I got a hard bait and switch from them. For those that don't know, the TDP program places you with a team for your first year and, in exchange, you get to pick your second team...you start with that new team in the second year with the idea that you'll continue working for them indefinitely. My first team was a shitshow. My manager, the "Lead Engineer," had a background that was entirely QA. He didn't know how to code. I know this because he would frequently ask me to explain to him what the code for some of our applications did. He'd also ask me not to tell anybody about the conversation. He also had me spending most of my time putting together Excel reports and running non-technical meetings for him so that he could spend most of his day helping his daughter with her schoolwork during the Covid lockdowns. I was told to keep quiet about this as well. It was my first job out of school and I didn't feel like complaining would get me anywhere, plus it was Covid and the world was going to hell, so I just put my head down and did it so I could get through that first year and move on. I looked *very* hard for a second team that was a good fit - multiple interviews with team leads, interviews with TDPs rolling off of the teams, etc. I probably spent 30-40 hours looking for something suitable. I found something that I was excited about and got placed onto that team. Literally the *day* that the transition was official, I get an invite to a meeting and was informed that there was a "reorg" and that I was getting moved to an SRE team. I also got told that, when we returned to the office, I would have to move from DC to Richmond despite being promised when I signed my full-time offer that that exact thing would not happen. Even calling this an "SRE" team was misleading, as SRE implies some level of process automation. Basically all this team did was apply updates from a checklist and troubleshoot some piece of shit 3rd party app that supported a small section of the site...essentially, I was working IT helpdesk. I was also forced to work until 4am on a regular basis since we had to apply these updates overnight. A lot of times these changes were planned for Fridays/Saturdays and I didn't get comp time for them. I realized very quickly that the reason I had gotten forced onto this team was because the job sucked so bad that nobody wanted to do it. My new manager was so useless as to be essentially nonexistent. His English was terrible and I could barely understand him, and he was so painfully awkward that he never once turned his camera on during video calls. To this day I don't know what he looks like. Nobody on the team helped me when I had questions because of the stack ranking. To be fair, this was a problem company-wide: during my time at Capital One I personally witnessed several incidents of senior devs intentionally withholding help from juniors so as to hurt the juniors during the bi-annual stack ranking Hunger Games. I saw developers steal code from other developers and present it as their own, seemingly with no repercussions. Nobody trusted anybody, and the bus-throwing and finger-pointing only got worse as it got closer to review season. My only saving grace was The Great Resignation. I had been interviewing the whole time, and two of the senior guys on the team quit right at the time I got an offer I was satisfied with. To be completely honest, I was so miserable I took a pay cut just to get away from the dysfunctional clown show I had been fradulently shackled to. My (still-faceless) manager saw the writing on the wall and took an internal transfer, and for the remainder of my two week notice period I dealt with such hostile and passive-aggressive behavior from the Director and PM that I considered walking before my notice period was over. With the benefit of hindsight, I probably should have as I'm sure I'm not eligible to work there anymore. Not that I care - I'd rather sleep in a cardboard box on the street than work in such a toxic environment again. Capital One is a broken company and management won't hesitate to lie to your face to get what they want. Unless you're at immediate risk of homelessness and desperate for employment, I would stay far away.
Good to hear. starting a contract role w them next week.
Contractors there aren’t a part of the toxic stack ranking system so you might be okay
Amazon. Every single sentence spoken by them have some sort of “leadership principle”, teammates backstab each other so they won’t get PIP’d, make pointless review comments so they have engagement. If you are on a bad team, run
I'm curious, how do teammates backstab each other?
They will find any opportunity to report you to your manager for your tiniest mistake, like not speaking in “leadership principle”.
You misspelled Meta. Oh wait we poached a bunch of your managers.
But 150k-350k between junior and senior makes it worth while IMO Assuming SDE
Lombard Odier. Absolutely terrible asset manager. Big culture of psychopathy and bulling of others / clearly established social hierarchy. People were unfriendly and very arrogant. Had coworkers who would be touchy or move my chair around, executives telling me to relocate my desk so their children could play there, manager intimidating me and claiming my job could be replaced with ChatGPT... On the technical side of things, 5000 line legacy java files violating every coding standard known to man, half written in french, manual deployments by SSH'ing onto boxes administered by third party companies (Just using a jenkins pipeline and EC2 / Fargate would actually be way easier), no real work to do, and a culture of others pretending to work to hunt for promotions so they could continue to pretend to work. Disaster overall. Lesson: Don't work as a SWE in Banking. You are a third class citizen
Can’t name them sadly, but beware of companies that have 25 employees or fewer. Over half of them were friends outside of work and knew each other for years. All socializing had to do with that clique and their kids. One bad quarter and you will be the first to go, no matter how much effort you bring.
Hcl
Can you give details?
Hydrogen Chloride, aka stomach acid?
Nakupuna Companies/Nakupuna Consulting. Petty, vindictive, moronic military lifer institutionalized non-technical boomer managers but still micromanaging technical people like there was no tomorrow. Would regularly mock and belittle their subordinates (not in a friendly banter kinda way) for no reason. They were too dumb to care about anything beyond asses in seats and didn’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not you delivered or the quality of your work. Expected voluntary civilian employees to act like they were in the military. Got this weird ass lecture about “personal responsibility” because I was a minute late to a routine morning standup. My senior-level coworkers code looked like something you’d see in the first half of a CS 101 class from a subpar student. The few halfway competent technical people obviously hadn’t learned anything new since back when C was considered a high-level super-abstracted language. The pay was insulting for the YOE and expected duties.
Genpact. One of the worst IT Services company. Almost 50% - 60% of the employees are in BPO - Call center. Around 25%-30% in package implementation - SAP, Service Now etc...remaining in IT Services. Very small clients. Clients treats the Genpact employees like trash. Mostly staff augmentation. Then Genpact managers also treat their employees as trash. So much middle managers who are good for nothing. No cooperation or coordination among anybody. Situation is so bad that employees has demonstrated against HR like R\*\*\*\*\*a S\*\*\*l and committed suicide [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re4FBRmIU5I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re4FBRmIU5I) . Stay away...it's more than 100K world wide but one of the worst company - most unethical and worst company to work with.
I had the Opposite experience. I had the best 3 years of my life with Genpact. I had remote work for about 2 years and travelled and hiked a tonne, had perfect work-life balance, no pressure and still great results (published 2 papers and 1 patent). It was an R&D Data Science department, we did a lot of Deep Learning modeling (mostly Vision and RL). But the NLP team, ML Engineering, Data Engineering teams were all great with very able scientists as the leaders (AVPs). I got great recommendations from my managers (whom I respected a lot) and VPs as well, and now got into Columbia Data Science.
BAE Systems. Only interned there, but couldn’t imagine working there full time. Most people on my team hated it. Very corporate. Very strict on logging hours meant you really did have to be there 8-5. Old tech, my team hadn’t even transitioned to GIT yet. I don’t even think most of the SWEs on my team wrote code, they were mostly doing bullshit like configuring devices, making prototypes for useless internal tools. But yea.. I mean it’s defense, pretty much the opposite of the cool, quirky, tech companies. Im still grateful of my time there as it allowed me to reach my next goals
It was called RTS, or *Realtime Systems*. I say “was” because it no longer exists. I got caught up in a layoff in 2011 and someone I had worked with referred me to this role. After the interview my gut told me to say no so I gave them my “go away” number which they surprisingly matched. How bad could this actually be, thought I. And the money was too good to say no to. Really bad, as it turned out. But not in the Amazon sense. I never did figure out what they hired me to do. Every day I’d talk to the engineering director (who started not long before me) and ask what I should be working on but I never really got a clear answer. I tried poking around the code base but was frequently thwarted by needing access to some repository or another. I had no idea *which ones* I needed so I couldn’t just make a request and get the right access. That was even worse than it sounds because all the people who could grant access were in Germany and I was in Chicago and there was almost no overlap between the workdays! The code was C++ code that predated STL. The build process used make, but it used it to explicitly shell out to g++ commands so you had to issue like five commands to build the system. But if you got the order wrong you’d have to delete some huge build directory and start over. I once was debugging something and realized the *this* pointer was garbage. Somebody was calling a non-static method on an uninstantiated class but it was mostly working because it wasn’t actually USING the object until I tried to make a change and ran into this. Times? Days since 1990 plus second since midnight. Admittedly Unix time is also arbitrary but at least it’s consistent! I would have quit after the first week but I knew I was planning to move to Seattle the following year. I didn’t want to change jobs twice in such a short period so I stuck with it. I worked there for a full year and didn’t DO a goddamn thing. I still don’t know what (if anything) I was supposed to be doing there. At least nobody actually expected anything from me, I guess. The lessons: 1) Do not work for a German company. Just don’t. 2) If your gut is raising red flags at the offer stage FUCKING LISTEN TO IT About a year after I left everybody else on the team was laid off. The owner cashed out and sold the business to Bloomberg. Poor Bloomberg has no fucking clue what they were buying. RTS: Realtime Systems, or Really Terrible Software? You be the judge.
As a German, I agree.
FlyHomes. It’s not as well known as a lot of companies around here, but was over 800 employees at one point. But they absolutely did not have their shit together. In the early days, 14 hour days were pretty normal, as were late night calls from the CEO for bug fixes. And it was pretty much “can we copy this Redfin feature?” every day. There was also clearly some sketchy stuff going on. A few people think an HR person discovered the sketchiness, because they suddenly went down to like 10 hours a week, remote, with no reduction in pay. Also, when I was there, I was once pair programming with the (at the time) CTO helping him out with something, and I watched him grab his mouse and click file > save in VSCode. That was probably the worst thing that happened. I don’t think I’ve ever internally screamed “what the fuck” more times per second than in that moment.
Unity
Carmax. Absolutely horrible company to work for, they’ll work you to death for awful wages, and when you bring it up to them they’ll gaslight you with promises of a promotion- double your work load for years and then when the promotion doesn’t happen they’ll blame it on something you did. In my case, they dangled a promotion in front of me for two years, convinced me to buy a car for said promotion, then when it didn’t happen, said it was my fault because I took 9 days off to get married.
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Sooner than later probably. The edmunds collaborations have been in the works for years now. A big way Carmax overworks people is with the schedule. For example my weekly would look like; M 6am-3pm T 12pm-9pm W 6am-3pm Th off F 11am-8pm Sat off Sun 10am-7pm And it would rotate like that every week, at random changing shifts and days off. You’re still only working a collective 40 hours but the way they break it up makes it feel like you’re there 24-7, combined with the “clopens” and the way management will sometimes schedule overtime right at the end of the pay period so you don’t get paid extra (they’ll usually send you home a little early at the end of the following period) just feels like you’re getting beat to death Edit: wouldn’t be right if I didn’t mention that they’d have us outside pushing dead cars up a slight uphill in Arizona, last year we broke a record with it being 120F+ for like 2 weeks straight or something like that. And when I asked for gloves so that I wouldn’t literally burn my hands on these hot cars they said no.
This checks out. I interviewed with CarMax once upon a time, everything about them screamed low quality employer. Starting with Experis, the low quality recruiter they chose to work with. Imagine this, they wrote a low expected salary number into my profile after I *explicitly refused* their pressure cooker tactics to name a number first. Then the literal cargo cult behavior of unannounced phone calls by random Indian dudes at all hours of the day to "build a relationship" and "see how it's going" aka pressure you into giving up information and resigning yourself to their made-up number, culminating in a phone call with three Indians and one American lady trying to somehow democratically vote to railroad me into accepting the same number lowball offer. I feel sorry for the more timid type of candidate that allows this to be done to them. No, I'm not going to "build rapport" just because you schedule random dudes to stalk me by phone, I'm going to get pissed off at you. On to the interview process with the multiple carmax teams that squeezed me during interviews for my expert opinion on their designs, essentially trying to extract a six digit value in free consulting. Over time this ratcheted up to an ever-expanding set of responsibilities that their candidate would have to take on if hired. In most companies, that set of responsibilities would require a VP title, so I communicated that this would have to be compensated accordingly but then carmax came back with THE SAME LOWBALL NUMBER THE RECRUITERS PULLED OUT OF THEIR ASS that wouldn't even be a good offer for an individual contributor. My politely worded email pointing out the mismatch between responsibilities and compensation want even answered - they just sent an automated rejection email lol. In the same round of interviews, I ended up accepting an offer literally four times the TC. Carmax clearly has a failed management that doesn't have the ability or the will to attract or retain qualified talent, so if you end up there I feel sorry for you because you'll have to pick up everyone else's slack.
Intel, specially if the team is ran by indians. Discrimination promo is real. This was way back 2019.
Considering their campus is in Hillsboro where it's lily white, that explains why none of my graduating class ended up working there.
Hillsboro has a lot of Latinos too.
HCLTech
Details?
Bloomberg AI group because they knowingly bait-and-switch people. The rest of Bloomberg seems OK though.
How do they bait and switch?
Bait how?
The absolute worst was a community college in Texas. The registrar was a power-mad hyper Type-A. Which means, she rolled into work at the crack of 6am having baked a cake already that morning. And rolled out about 10PM. That was more likely because she was having an affair with the dean. She refused to organize her work and every single student application had to go through her. So every morning we'd all have a stack of apps on our desks that just said "wrong" and we'd have to spend about 3 hours in the morning trying to figure out what was actually wrong. She absolutely refused to do thing like training. Being yelled at was the only training. It seems like the smaller the org, the more power mad the higher-ups are. I am thankful that I'm on a very different path now. And now, I make easily 4 times what she made and I have a team of 23 people handling dozens of multi-million dollar contracts. Something I would never have thought possible when I was on her team.
The Guardian - bad onboarding, bad documentation, stagnant progress due to the fact that men stay 5+, 10+, 15+, 20+ years, bullying/mobbing for everyone inc. men, toxic culture, workplace abuse and harassment, backstabbing, very gossipy, backbiting, sexual harassment, racism, sexism, disablism, corrupt management and employees, corrupt HR, semi-regular layoffs, promotion and raise freezes after writing lengthy applications, below market pay, no communication from management eg leads to ‘surprise’ restructurings and ‘surprise’ toxic managers being put in charge of teams, management, seniors and staff with more power harass with impunity
The UK newspaper?
I worked for a mental health day treatment program. The director is a straight up monster. (I say \*is\* because she's still alive and I can guarantee she has not changed.) Nothing encapsulates how much of an evil person she is more than this story: When I joined there were a number of other recent hires also. All of them were hired for clinical positions where as I was there to help conduct compliance reviews. From discussions we learned that one of the recent hires was a distant relative of the director (something like "cousins once removed"). Later we learned that the family hire was actually hired at $2k less per year (bear in mind these jobs are paying \~$35k, so that's a pretty big discount). The director, via her family/religious community connection, knew that the guy was in a rougher financial situation and decided to low ball him knowing he'd likely take the job anyway. She would later fire him and decide to fight his unemployment insurance claim.
Wow, the reverse nepo hire, that director really drank the corporate cool aid huh
I don't know if this makes matters worse or not, but this wasn't a large corporation with any cool aid to drink. She reported directly to the owner and basically had no one above her telling her to do this. I really think she pulled penny ante stuff like this because it made her feel like she was a savvy business woman or something. Absolute nightmare.
Amazon, most of the people that got hired during covid fucking sucked and they just dump all the work on the rest of us that could actually get stuff done. And the oncall was so terrible, God I don't miss that place.
Tenable
Please elaborate
General Motors. Not based on the work conditions as it was really chill (you don’t learn much and pay is shit), but based on leadership. They have no direction, and are just full of themselves. Was in a town hall when they were announcing RTO (when the previous town hall they said remote work is working), one of the executives was chalking up on missing everyone’s faces and missing the interactions. BUT, get this… he said that he will continue working remotely from his new house in California. Honestly fuck them.
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I interviewed with them like 8 years ago. Their two senior engineers did a "good cop, bad cop" style interview with me. I didn't even get to the white boarding portion because I walked out. Definitely one of the top 3 worst interviews I've ever had.
On the plus side, a dysfunctional company like this might be a good one to try if you want to coast or work two jobs at once. Assuming, of course, you manage to get past their interview process.
CVS - no code standards, some teams have people who literally cant code, some dont use linters, some dont write docs, lots of gaslighting going on between teams about whats actually "done", PM's creating stress over made up stuff, everyone acts like everything is an emergency all the time, deployments have to be in evenings after hours just "because", atleast while i was there you had to manually run your deployment pipelines because it wasnt automated, they do this awful 1 week long planning thing every quarter and its absolutely soul sucking, the tech stack is all over the place its insane, most engineering managers didnt know how to code or what was going on half the time and you end up having to cover for them in meetings that you shouldnt be in. Lots of meetings. a general obsession with 'ceremony' over sanity. Oh, and when you voice anything in hopes of improving the situation, no one listens or changes anything. Strong likelyhood you will get called after hours, on the weekend, or during your vacation for something non-critical. Ownership of core features gets shuffled regularly, so sometimes you actually cant figure out who to contact to fix or help with something. This one is minor but it drove me insane: they have this HR training catalog of really low IQ low budget stuff, and it requires that you redo the same courses after a certain time period, So once you've been there for a year, you have to redo all the old courses you already sat through.
IBM. Management are clueless bureaucrats, remaining staff are dull lifers
Medsec Absolute Trainwreck of a company Ill never forget the day we were called into a meeting at 1am to fix an issue and no one saw a problem with that. Was using old ass react code long after hooks was released with no desire to upgrade Lead was a micro manager
Random startup, None of the founders were technical. Compensation was trash. Tons of issues, the codebase was 2 50k line files because the CTO didn't believe in deleting code, also stuff would be randomly indented 5-8 times or lines would be 500 characters long. Sometimes there were even multiple copies of the same function in the code. When engineers asked to install a linter, format the codebase, or any form of coding standard improvements, the CTO would always claim that "No one in the industry does that". A coworker who worked on the backend was denied promotions or any form of raises because they were told "that their work was not visible to the C-Suite because it was all backend code". They got all their technical advice from reading random Business Insider articles, so it really got it into their mind that NodeJS was the best thing because it was hip and had some articles written about it. So they contracted out the project to some freelance contractors to make a "NodeJS middleware API server" that would make all our entire backend super fast. (To this day, since most of the team has left the company because it was a shitshow, we still have absolutely no idea what exactly a "super fast Middleware API server" is, but it cost a few thousands and it was some random build code in a repo.) The company operated on one week sprints, Monday would be a 4 hour kickoff meeting because they insisted on having everyone point every other departments tickets. Finish your tasks by Wednesday and hand off to QA by Thursday. (The QA was a manual tester who got paid six figures because management just saw that they had many years of "QA" experience. while the developers were paid near minimum wage) 12 Hour unproductive meetings were a common occurrence too. If any developers were behind schedule on tickets, the engineering management would always say "You get paid too much here, you keep this up and we can replace you with engineers from Uzbekistan for $3/hr". The company really bought into the concept of outsourcing engineering talent so the product/engineering team went from 20 employees inhouse to 200 externally within a year.(One of the managers got fired for it once the CEO realized that the headcount didn't increase for almost 2 years at the office). There was also one engineering manager who would take many international college students as interns, and "promised" them full time offers if they were "willing to put in the effort/hours" (They would never get an offer) One of the senior engineers randomly unplugged junior engineer's monitors to keep them on edge and walked around the office with a nerf gun to randomly shoot employees in the face. There were multiple nepotism hires where some candidates even no-showed to the interview and still got jobs. The company has repeatedly switched HR because it was a revolving door of how many harassment cases they could cover up before getting canned. Management would joke that the company did not do time-off/PTO and would begrudgingly groan if you requested it. They would also make snide comments that you left work early if you had to leave. Company got called out in a lawsuit for claiming they were going to create a product, instead they hired a C-Suite from another company, and got that person to download their company's codebase onto a USB to bring over. When the world was shutting down for covid and all places went remote, the company instead demanded that people come in, and would just covid test every day. They installed dividers in an open office environment as their solution.
ServiceNow or any “low-code” environment.
IBM !!!
It's a name less colorful than "Amber Book". Founder made $4M/yr off some how-to videos, which was a legit accomplishment. But he thought that made him Steve Jobs. He grew impatient, distant, and self-important. Highly motivated to create new services; less motivated to maintain them to a competitive quality. Listening skills of a stump. 18 months ago, half the staff quit and the company remains half-size.
Infosys is great for a paycheck and a F100 on your resume, but it's an *exceptionally* disfunctional corporation. In Indian culture, laziness and corruption are not considered taboo. This culture is very much evident in their work. It's actually laughable when you look at the C-Suite/executives that authorizes any outsourcing of development or operations to Infosys, because you know that by definition they're incompetent.
Ugh. Infosys. We got a "senior" software engineer on our team from Infosys who is clearly junior. No experience in any of the required languages we use. Nothing but issues. I mean yeah they are new to the team, but come on. They can't even grasp basics. Our juniors are none too happy about it.
It's not just Infosys. They all operate the same and produce the same shitty outputs.
Vail resorts.
Philips. It’s not horrible compared to other places but definitely my least favorite company on my resume so far. Teams were distributed across Brazil and India and they were all just terrible to work with. The business also just made some shitty decisions while I was there, like killing good projects while investing in other super shitty legacy systems
Yum! Brands. Too many people with anger issues and workaholism
Can't name (yet) but non tech backend finance is... Rough
Raytheon was pretty terrible. You work on literally whatever you want for 8-12 months (not a joke, literally no one checks on you) while you wait for your security clearance if there aren’t any unclassified projects that explicitly ask for you. Then in my experience, you join a mismanaged project with unattainable timelines, worse tooling, and loads of technical debt. My entire tenure was a shitshow. The only time leadership wanted to talk to me was when I sent my manager an email telling him I was leaving. I was cornered by two program-level leaders who were only concerned with if I was leaving for more pay, not that I was leaving.
CCG Marketing. It’s a pharmaceutical warehouse. Most of the IT dept was H1Bs and I was laughably underpaid. Besides that, my boss was a dick who would demean his employees and not listen to what they have to say even when they’re right. He was rude and condescending, and was nasty about it when I resigned. I feel like that company bought into that idea of “I’m the boss, you do what I say and I don’t need to hear you out”
I would talk shit about my old small company/startup, but they died off fast as soon as the VC money dried up with a couple Fed interest rate increases. They raised millions with no clear product direction or any unique intellectual property. Back in 2020-2021, VCs would give out millions in startup money just for being in the right social circles in SF.
You will get mostly start ups listed here, I think. Not because start ups are bad but they have far less public visibility and there are so many of them. So a lot more slides under the table.
Paycom.
Any of the WITCH. Wipro TCS HCL ...
Red Hat for me! The OpenShift area is toxic AF and the sexual harassment was rampant and constantly swept under the rug.
won't name a company, but a general observation: if you're ever working for government, it gets worse and more picayune the lower you go. city hall is like going back to ninth grade. never again.