Optum reviews

Low annual salary increases. Awards given for appreciation of efforts have no monetary value for some of the teams and some they do. Now way to move higher in your role due to limiting how many can have the same title on the teams. People who continuously drop the ball with their work aren’t held accountable because of who they know. The rest of team has to pick up the slack and cover them. Management knows and does nothing.

This job is the worst one I've ever had. The following are regular occurrences that I saw as a lead: * Upper management (above your director) will literally never listen to anything a technical person says * This results in them coming with arbitrary, impossible deadlines and they just force you to work absurd hours until it's done, at which point they've moved on to the next shiny thing * They are actively offshoring to India, with a goal of being 70% offshore ASAP. They hire cheap, even for India, so the quality of that work is extra dubious. * The Indian team actually has a better WLB than the on-shore US team, in that they're only expected to be available during the Indian working hours -- the US team has to be available the rest of those hours. * You, as an engineer, will have about 4 layers of contact between the design and UX people. You will have to go through your severely overworked and underpaid PMs/PJMs because the designers just ignore you. * Those same designers often give unfinished work weeks late -- but you still have the same deadline. And yes, you will work hard hours to meet it, and if you don't complete it, you take the blame. * There is no longer QA -- they offshored them but they straight up do not work. I don't mean that with any ounce of hyperbole -- you and your team will be your own QA. * The execs just sit in "Q&A"s talking about how they jet around the world for literally half the meeting * The company policy is explicitly to stack-rank and lay off everyone who scores 2/5 or below; if there aren't enough of those, they start digging into the 3s. * The company also heavily down pressures the reviews so that a 5 becomes a 3. You have to fight very, very hard to get that overturned. Most people end up barely above water when they're excellent engineers. * There's been a promotion freeze since like, 2021 -- this goes above your director. Even the director of your department can't get you promoted. * They no longer give stock refreshers, and the bonus/raise pool is anemic * This is all the while we are being constantly told in Town Halls that we are "extremely profitable" * The company actively pushes GitHub Copilot as it's solution to problems that are entirely caused by the lack of organization * The aforementioned offshore teams also, by the admission of one engineer in a meeting, "proudly" do "80%" of their work through Copilot. As in, they only write 20% themselves. That same engineer struggled mightily in his demonstration to get Copilot to work for him. * The TDP program is a lie -- they will keep you at that grade and pay until you quit, even if it takes years. Again, this decision goes above your director.