The product management here was the erratic and disorganized I've ever seen at a software development company, especially for such a relatively small company.
We had a dedicated scrummaster who was powerless to enact simple planning tools like estimating sprint points and work capacity due to our roadmap of features constantly changing on a daily basis. Instead, our planning meetings were often centered around whether we thought our executive team might be prioritizing a feature based on their tone of voice about it at a recent meeting or how excited they seemed about it; that's how dysfunctional our planning process was. It always felt like reading tea leaves instead of actually having clear objectives.
We were routinely forced to completely change priorities at the last minute, or add a bunch of last-minute changes on a whim of the executive leadership team who never seemed to understand their role in scope creep and pushed deadlines. Additionally, the new features we were being asked to develop did not seem to be benefiting our core product; instead, they only made it more complicated and confusing. Executive leadership micromanaged everything.
Feature requirements were never documented very well, so as a software developer, I never had a clear sense of whether I was meeting the objectives of each assignment. When something was missed because it wasn't communicated to a developer clearly, the blame was implicitly put on the development team for not meeting these previously-unknown requirements instead of trying to deconstruct our dysfunctional planning and management processes.
My direct manager checked in with me once during my first week and then never again after that, so I never knew if I was meeting his expectations of me. He was always focusing his time and energy on meeting with the executive team to clarify feature requirements and negotiate on unreasonable deadlines. I was promised a performance review after my first 90 days, but it never happened. I felt a distinct absence of support from both my manager and the rest of my development team; we all felt too siloed away from each other. Very little collaboration and no pair programming. I never received any feedback on my work, positive or negative, from anyone.
There is an absence of clear leadership on the software team. Technical planning meetings were often filled with awkward silences around important questions around architecture. My suggestions based on past experience with larger software projects were usually ignored and dismissed condescendingly by other more junior engineers on the project.
I was a senior-level engineer, but the junior engineer who reported to me on the project routinely ignored my guidance and requests for changes to his code in pull requests. PR reviews became a joke after a short while since I knew my feedback to him was totally irrelevant to everyone on the team. Cowboy coding is the norm here.
PTO is minimal (2 weeks combined sick/vacation). I had to take over a week off due to having symptoms of COVID-19; when I came back to work, I was chastised for this by my direct manager and told to stop taking any more sick leave. Employees should definitely not be shamed for taking sick leave when they are ill, especially if they have acute symptoms of COVID-19 during a serious pandemic.
