Company lacks foresight and hindsight. Projects get abandoned to work on whatever is the newest buzzword project in the office, leading to many missed deadlines. This in turn increases stress in the office, and unprofessional "feel bad about yourself" lectures from upper management. Current projects are completed hastily and without proper planning to try and meet arbitrary and unrealistic deadlines as they try to get things out the door. This has left the company with a poorly written, unmanageable codebase littered with preventable bugs that waste time and drain company resources. The ideology of "what's worth doing is worth doing well" is very much NOT a part of this company’s culture.
Middle management doesn’t support or back up their developers. As a developer, it feels as if you are doing freelance work for the bad kind of client (overbearing, demanding, and stressful), instead of as part of a team. They overwork and underpay their developers, having devs stay late beyond the company’s EOD and often coming in on weekends.
It’s virtually impossible to maintain a healthy work/life balance. Any given work week could easily be upwards of 50 or 60 hours, and without any more than the legally mandated 1-hour lunch break each day. Even checking your phone during bathroom breaks, for example, is extremely frowned upon as "it distracts from work," despite their promise of frequent breaks in order to stay productive throughout long 10-hour days.
