Pros
Not many. - Some really great engineers. - Some Product Owners are very knowledgeable due to their tenure, but they're completely overworked. - Friendly people (mostly). - Lots of opportunity to improve things.
Cons
Where do I even begin? - Most dysfunctional R&D organization I've ever worked for. - All of the customers are angry and threatening to withhold payments because of consistent product issues and failure to meet deadlines. - No work-life balance and a complete disregard for boundaries. Managers will schedule meetings at all hours of the day, any day of the week. Had one manager schedule a Sunday morning meeting! Frequent 7:30am meetings or even earlier in some cases. - Antiquated management style, with HR not able or willing to keep up with industry market trends, somehow thinking that we should be grateful to have a job with them, despite low pay (like $50K lower than other companies, depending on the role). - No onboarding process and HR frequently drops the ball in getting new hires their laptops in time for their first day (bad first impression), and drag their feet when getting new hires their internal systems access or when they've messed something up on employee pay. - Chaos and disorganization is rampant. Upper management have no idea what they're doing. - Complete lack of direction and ownership. Nobody has any idea who owns what or who to contact when things go wrong. - Fires have to be fought literally every day. Customer Experience team escalates Severity 1 and 2 issues every day and we don't have teams with the knowledge or capacity to support those issues. Sprint commitments are constantly interrupted as a result. - Nobody in management is technical and they don't know how to run an engineering department. They're all Program Managers by background and they don't understand the implications of their decisions. - No Engineering Managers (or budget to hire some), just "Senior" Development Managers who are expected to directly manage the work of four scrums and 25 engineers. - HR is hostile towards staff and fails at their core job function (hiring, onboarding, and making sure staff have what they need to do their jobs). - Scope, timelines, and budget are all non-negotiable and locked in place by management, which means the only thing that can be cut is quality. - The VP wants everything. All the features delivered yesterday, at high quality and within budget. He's completely delusional and never communicates to his department (no emails encouraging us, no town halls for us to ask questions, nothing - he might as well not exist). - The VP knee-capped his own organization. He shut down the Brisbane and Atlanta studios, bought a company in India (because, hey, they're cheaper and we get more people!). Everyone from Brisbane and Atlanta left before transferring knowledge to the India team, so there's a massive knowledge void and the India team was set up for failure. - Nothing is documented and their confluence space is a complete mess. Can't find anything. No single sources of truth, and documents are floating around everywhere with conflicting information. Nobody even knows how the release process works! - Extremely poor communication all around. Management makes decisions in silos, Product Managers provide vague delivery dates and don't make themselves available for requirements clarifications. You frequently have to follow up with people 3 or 4 times before escalating in order to get a response. - Toxic employees are allowed to stick around. Good people keep leaving. - NOTHING is documented. All of the processes and how to do things lived in the heads of some senior development managers who were subsequently asked to leave the company (again, poor management decisions) only to leave a massive process and knowledge void again. - R&D teams are completely short-staffed with no willingness to increase budget from VP or to slow down so we can organize ourselves after all of the departures. - VP threatens to cut department funding if deadlines aren't hit, despite our ability to deliver being entirely hindered by his poor decisions. - High stress environment and nobody feels like they have the ability to take time off because they're so over-worked. People working 16 hour days sometimes, it's ridiculous! I could go on and on. This place is an absolute mess.