This place has somehow created the worst engineering culture I have ever seen or heard of. First off, even though they claim to be an Agile environment, that could not be further from the truth. I felt every scrum meeting was drawn out to the point where most of the meeting was a waste of time. It was like someone read a book on Agile, implemented it, but never even slightly understood the benefits of it and why companies would want to use it. Daily standups felt as if the sole purpose was for management to make sure we were actually doing work and deserving of a paycheck twice a month—as opposed to their actual purpose of quick, cross-divisional updates and elimination of blockers. Standups would regularly last 30 minutes for only a handful of people! Sprint retrospectives were even more of a waste of time. Spoke up about something that could be improved for next sprint? Ten out of ten times, management would respond by spinning it in a way where you were the one who was at fault and nothing needed to be improved other than lessening the number of mistakes you made.
Code reviews are comprised of a certain engineer talking at you in the most condescending tone imaginable about meaningless stuff in your commit. About 90% of code feedback was regarding your code comments and not about improving your code. Did you use the word “fetch” in your comment AND in the name of your method? That’s wrong, you need to change it. Oh, and god forbid the first word of a comment was plural—as they are all required to be singular. Did you write a comment that wasn’t worded in an absolutely perfect way? You’re in for a 30-minute lecture on why he is right and you are wrong.
This all sound great so far? Wait until there is a production issue. The already hostile environment turns into a warzone. You will be called names, you will have every finger pointed at you, and you WILL hear things such as “well if you did it the way I said we wouldn’t have this problem.” Don’t think about complaining to management about this abuse—they’ll just tell you to grow a thicker skin. Apparently being professional (even when under stress) in 2017 is either not cool or too hard.
When all this is not happening, all you are doing is sitting at your desk with headphones on staring at your computer screen. Don’t even think about asking senior engineers a simple question without a JIRA ticket as a reason for having the question.
This all really sucks because the other non-engineers are really good and cool people. There are some cool engineers as well, but unfortunately at this point they are victims of the toxic culture themselves. I used to have a job where I literally shoveled horse manure all day—and that job was better than being an engineer at 33Across.
