The working environment was toxic, primarily due to the behavior of the CTO. The CTO consistently treated employees rudely, showing little appreciation for their work and often finding reasons to diminish them. This created a very demoralizing atmosphere.
Micromanagement was the norm, with employees not considered trustworthy and required to report in detail how they spent their time. This level of oversight made it difficult to focus on actual work and contributed to a stressful environment.
The development team lacked a true team leader. Instead, the CTO assumed this role but was unhelpful when approached with problems, often responding with "I am CTO, not a developer." This was particularly frustrating as he was the one assigning tasks and was, in fact, also a developer.
Daily meetings were a source of stress for all staff members. Everyone was tense before the meetings, worried about what the CTO would say, as he was very rude, often yelled at us, and never apologized.
Task documentation was consistently poor. In my entire year at the company, I never received proper documentation for any task. Instructions were often limited to a single screenshot and one line of description, making it difficult to understand what needed to be done.
The technology used was very outdated. We were required to use Oracle ADF, which is unbelievably terrible. The CTO gave us a 14-hour course to learn it over 1-2 weeks, followed by a simple CRUD form as a test task. After that, we were assigned highly complicated tasks in ADF, despite the CTO not having a good understanding of ADF himself.
Overtime was not paid, even when the CTO called meetings on Teams at 4:59 PM that lasted for 1-2 or more hours. This was not considered overtime, which was incredibly unfair.
The office itself was decent but had some issues. It lacked regular cleaning, and there was often a lot of dust. Additionally, there was no drinking water provided; everyone had to buy their own bottles of water. The tap water was technically drinkable, but it tasted terrible, even the CTO when he came to our office didn't drink it.
In most places in Europe, the lunch break is 1 hour, but in the office in Kosovo, it was reduced to 30 minutes because the CTO thought we didn't need a full hour. If we took the full hour, we were obligated to stay 30 minutes longer.
Overall, the task management was poor, leading to overwork, underpayment, and a general feeling of being underappreciated. The combination of these factors made it challenging to stay motivated and productive.