Honest observation, lots of employees in IT are scared. This is information you find while building relationships with people inside the company beyond work, thus management would not be privy to it.
Many people believe the internal company surveys are not anonymous and thus won’t speak up about concerning matters in fear of retaliation. This result in extremely positive surveys although they don’t paint a full picture. Retaliation is real, but hidden.
The dangerous thing , is that the retaliation will be very well hidden but ever so present. It will stunt your career growth within the company regardless of performance or good nature.
If you build strong relationships with management and people closer to executives, you will notice some things are handled based on that executives opinion even if it’s wrong. Management won’t speak up on fear of retaliation or being held on a negative view. This would stunt their career growth. These practices are not HR compliant either thus HR is also not being made aware of some of these issues hence it can’t get better.
Every time someone leaves the company, if they mention something negative, it is blamed on the person leaving and excused by saying “The employee did not fit our culture”, even if the employee was an amazing cultural fit. Again no one will speak out due to fear or say.. “ no, this employee was actually good, we have some thing we need to work on”.
This company will let you go even if they rate you a solid performance on the yearly review and, blame your performance as you walk out.
Although this particular issue does not affect me, favoritism is real and many employees suffer from the effects of it.