Pros
The pros section was difficult to write, as every pro I attempted to articulate turned into a thinly veiled con. The one thing I can say unequivocally that went well was management’s hiring practices at the time. Unfortunately, all positions of authority that have any capability of making actual decisions are occupied by sycophantic hangers on that enjoy being a big fish in a small pond. Yet, somehow they managed to build the best development team I have ever had the pleasure to be a part of. The company brought on multiple new engineers all around the same time (all of which have now moved on to better jobs). Despite management’s belief to the contrary, each of these new hires was a more than capable developer, and a committed and professional employee. The development team made great strides towards improving both the software and the company’s development processes. Regardless of this progress, management obsessed over some perceived yet nonexistent negativity in the development team. Management did everything in their power to tear the team apart. Talking out loud in the open development area was actively discouraged, yet chat programs that facilitated communication across the whole team were outlawed. In addition, management spied on employee communications, whether verbal or electronic, then took those overheard conversations out of context and wielded them as a weapon against the developers. They also actively encouraged employees to inform on co-workers who voiced any degree of frustration or disagreement from the party line. Whoops, there I go. Like I said, everything seems to end up as a con. Let’s try this again. Management placed a high value on loyalty and number of years served. So much so, in fact, that certain individuals in the company were beyond reproach, no matter how incompetent. Any criticisms or suggestions for improvement towards these individuals were grounds for disciplinary action. New employees, regardless of how much previous experience they had or how many positive improvements they made in their short time with the company, were disregarded out of hand in terms of feedback. Management made it clear on multiple occasions that the only feedback they gave any weight to was from employees with many years of service. No value was placed on new perspectives, updated industry knowledge, or experience from prior job history. Dang, that turned into a con again. I told you this was difficult. I’ll just focus on the really obvious benefits of working at Structure Studios. Yeah, benefits. Structure Studios takes obvious pride in proclaiming its “generous” benefits package. The vacation time provided starts at 20 - err, no, 19 now that they took one away - days per year. That seems pretty great, but then you realize sick leave comes out of the same pool and there are only very limited rollover hours that expire quickly. All the standard healthcare, vision and dental packages are offered, but the company only minimally subsidizes the cost, leaving employees with a hefty bite taken out of their check. When offered a job, Structure Studios will pay you exactly the amount you ask. The bare minimum that you ask, actually, regardless of your qualifications or the prevailing average salary in that region. Semi-annual bonuses are awarded based on subjective employee performance measures. These bonuses are set at a specific dollar amount rather than a percentage of income, and thus never increase, even for inflation. They have a 401k plan, including employer contributions. Too bad that when I was there it didn’t kick in until after a year of service. Likewise, the education reimbursement benefit didn’t start for a year. To the best of the team’s knowledge, no one we knew had successfully utilized the reimbursement. In fact, one engineer asked to attend a locally-held convention on topics that directly related to that person’s job responsibilities, but was told that if management agreed to the conference, soon other employees would want the same thing. An artist requested reimbursement for a life drawing class, and management informed the employee that the company would not pay the artist to look at naked people. Wait. That ended up more con than pro again, didn’t it? Yikes! Okay, I’ll take one last stab at this. Events! Free food! How can that go wrong? Yes, yearly special events were held, such as weekend cruises, weekend nights on the Vegas strip, weekend trips to Disneyland. The key word here is weekend. On the rare occasion that such a trip took place during business hours, the employees who had conflicts and couldn’t attend were required to work while the rest of the company enjoyed the time off. It’s okay, though, because it was extremely frowned upon for an employee to decline participation, so most found a way to attend, whether they wanted to or not. The office had a full kitchen, stocked with free sugary snacks, frozen pizzas and burritos, and a variety of sodas. There was even a water dispenser which produced water that tasted like something died inside. All of these goodies were, management regularly informed employees, true signs of the company’s generosity. Friday lunches were provided, during which games such as bingo and pictionary were often played. Of course, participation in this generous fun time was mandatory, regardless of an employees personal comfort level with such activities. Make sure you thank management, too, or they’d remember your ungrateful attitude. A pool table sat in the hall, and game consoles were hooked up in the large media room, but neither saw much use as management understood anyone that used the facilities were obviously not fulfilling their jobs. Aww drats. That went south pretty fast. Fine, I give up. Let’s just move on to the cons, shall we?
Cons
Let’s focus on the technical portion of the job for a while. The code base was an example of almost every single anti-pattern possible. Technical leadership built the code base using undocumented and unenforced paradigms which caused incessant instability and buggy behavior. The worst part is not even that the code base was hacked together, poorly written, minimally commented, weakly architected, tightly coupled, extremely unstable, leaked memory and had sluggish performance. The real problem was that technical leadership refused to acknowledge the problem. There was active disapproval of time spent refactoring or improving existing systems. Several employees made various attempts to correct blatant flaws in the code base, but their efforts resulted in one employee being singled out, yelled at, and formally reprimanded. Developers had to constantly prove to management that they were earning their salary. As management had no background or training in software development, the only efforts that were valued were those with some obvious visual effect in the software. Technical improvements or architectural enhancements were not understood and thus frowned upon. Twice weekly developer scrum meetings were instituted, but these only served as a sort of performance review of what each employee had accomplished since the last meeting. Management even went so far as to inform one employee that they should put more effort into embellishing their update. Several standard systems that most development studios take for granted were not in place when the group of new hire developers first started. Eventually, the engineers implemented a continuous integration solution, functionality to help analyze and correct software crashes, a streamlined repository directory, and other enhancements. This was all done on their own initiative despite technical leadership’s continued attitude that such core technologies were a waste of time. Basic programming practices were not observed or valued. The only coding standard was to maintain the existing style of any given file, yet technical leadership regularly violated this tenet. Comments were extremely sparse and only spelled out the obvious. Code reviews were rarely performed, and only on employees management perceived as problematic. Even then, the code reviews focused on topics like “What was the most difficult part of writing this code?” rather than indicating specific recommendations to improve the submission. Other reviews were performed on code submitted three or more months before, long after the requirements and direction for that portion of the software had changed. Any attempt at dialog over the negative feedback in the code review was met with open hostility and interpreted as disrespect towards leadership. It was reiterated multiple times that the technical leadership was beyond reproach and alternate viewpoints were unacceptable. Meanwhile, technical leadership demonstrated extremely lax coding habits, and actively encouraged engineers to not waste time compiling for multiple variants or doing much in the way of testing. Tech leadership instead preferred to leave all but the most basic and cursory of testing to the customer support staff which doubled as a part time QA team. Management demonstrated that value was placed on speed of implementation over quality, and when new features from technical leadership resulted in program-wide bugs, other employees were blamed for the errors and forced to fix the problems. Beyond the issues an engineer faces when working at Structure Studios, there are multiple other concerns. If you are looking for a place where you can allow your skills and career to stagnate and simply rely on your ability to praise and stroke the egos of management, you may do well at Structure Studios. If, on the other hand, you take pride in your work, value a sense of ownership in the resulting product, and are eager to actively work towards the improvement of both the company and your own skills, look elsewhere. Performance reviews of employees were far from reliable. Development employees would receive glowing feedback during their twice yearly review, yet only a month later management would claim that employee had a poor attitude and failed to meet expectations. Employees that suffered from management disapproval would receive reprimands, but such reprimands rarely gave specific examples of poor performance, or clear and quantifiable means to improve. In the rare instances when specifics were given, leadership would dig for any excuse they could find, such as citing lines of code written as a metric for performance. Management claimed that they were open to feedback and improvement, but stressed they were only interested in ‘positive’ remarks. The post-sprint retrospective meetings originally gave the development team an opportunity to express concerns about the newly implemented Agile methodologies. After two months, however, management was furious with the perceived negativity in these meetings and required that all comments be strictly positive in nature. It was made explicitly clear that management was incapable of handling even the most gentle of constructive criticism in any form, whether written, spoken, presented as a group, or individually. Any efforts to help improve processes or facilitate communication were met at first with passive aggressive silence. A month or more later management lashed out with open hostility at those they perceived as the instigators of the supposed insubordination. In reality, there was no insubordination. All the developers genuinely had the best interests of the company in mind and wanted nothing but to help make things better. Negative attitudes only set in after management’s incompetent and bungling attempts to root out the imaginary disturbance. When an employee was singled out for a reprimand by management, criticisms leveled at the employee did not focus on specific events, incidents or professional shortcomings. Instead, the meeting focused on an employee’s personality flaws. For example, one employee was informed they had a tendency to “one-up” coworkers in casual conversation, and another was instructed that they needed to stop being overly analytical. These reprimands, given to each member of the development team about once a month, were given with a complete disregard for professionalism. Official disciplinary actions were sometimes conducted with another employee present from a different part of the company. HR was seldom present, but it would not have made a difference as there were blatant conflicts of interest between management and HR.