Painfully bureaucratic. More than half the job is requesting access, raising tickets, attending meetings. There is a constant need to provide support for consumers of existing systems, minimal accounting for that when planning work, and strict deadlines that rarely seem to correspond to an actual need. We end up operating in constant emergency mode. There are some good managers, but in general management is pretty disconnected from what day to day work looks like. Their priority is to find or concoct work on top of whatever their direct reports might already be doing. Preferably something high visibility or novel that they can brag about, with only loose connection to actual business needs. Return to office is only the latest erratic top-down agenda forced on us out of some combination of corporate monkey-see-monkey-do, shareholder demands, and passive aggressive downsizing. I've always been remote, >100 miles from an office that nobody on my team works at. I haven't been forced back or dismissed yet, but no guarantee about the future. Even if I do slide under the radar this time, this is a pattern of behavior. I fully expect that I will continue to be treated as a replaceable cog here in the future, so it is time to look elsewhere.
