Bear with me, this is gonna be a long list, but it's worth every minute reading.
- Delusional board members: CEO, COO and every board members, high management personals believe (or at least that's what they want to show) that the company is the most innovative in the world, that the company can do impossible things that nobody can achieve with absolutely no backing evidence of any great product. They constantly remind employees once a month that they are the top notch on the market, that our engineers are better than those at top tech companies .
- Incompetent managers: Most managers don't have good management skills. Some of them got promoted to be manager just after 3 years of being engineer from entry level. With lack of both technical and management knowledge, they could not make critical decision in how to proceed with the project. Almost all projects (I would say 90%) could not meet the deadline.
- Reluctant to change: As the company follows the "Seniority" culture of Japan, you have to ultimately respect your supervisors; i.e, you cannot point out their mistakes. It also takes a tremendous amount of effort to convince your manager/VP to make some changes, even if they are obvious. It takes us half a year to convince them to convert from using SVN to Git. Their reason is "I don't know how to use Git, therefore I will not use it, and so wouldn't you".
- No real system architect: They don't hire any expert to design the architecture of the system (There is no such position). As the result, engineers have to take the task and come up with terrible designs, which cause a lot of mess in current development. During some iterations, the entire Jenkins and GitLab keep failing because of incapability of CI.
- Not following industry standard: With most employees do not have CS background, instead of using UML and other standards of Software Development, they decided to put everything in spreed sheets. Without a unified format for those spreed sheets, it is impossible for engineers/managers to communicate. It might take up a lot of meetings in order to sort out a simple problem.
- Love reinventing the wheel: There is a huge team recreating a lot of technologies despite there are plenty of mature ones on the market. By using those, development time increases by a significant amount. However, the top management does not really care and you have to follow whatever in the road map, which is possible and better without using those frameworks. An example is that there was demand from engineers to use a newer version of Kafka for new features. Instead of doing that, they decided to recreate those features by themselves, which quality is not even close.
- Pay no attention to system performance: Although the original intention is to achieve 100 ms in every services, they did not carefully evaluate the overall performance. Without experienced engineers to do code review, bad codes incrementally added up that ruin the whole system. There is completely no stress test. Although the system is distributed, engineers and QE normally only test as the system runs on a single machine.
- Politics, a lot of politics: How you advance in you career is not decided by your talent and contribution but rather depends on your relationship with your boss. Your boss's decision is the one and only one that will affect your evaluation. All your teammates and colleagues' good words do not matter.
- Poor evaluation system: No matter how much you contribute to the company, you will be "rewarded" the same as the one who spent whole day watching YouTube or playing Chess. If you wonder what is the "reward", it's fixed bonus specified in the contract, and it is expected to decrease year by year due to the inflation of the Japanese yen. Even after getting promotion, that does not guarantee a pay raise. An "A" rated engineer (best evaluation result) did not not get any salary raise while one with "C" (bad evaluation) did get 4% (It did happen).
- Wasteful use of employees: They do frequently restructure the organization of all departments (probably once a year). During the process, a lot of bad job allocation happened. E.g, assign engineers to do feature documentation, consultant to do coding, UI designers to do CI. Their philosophy is everyone is the same, and anyone can do anyone's tasks.
- Recruitment: Somehow, they believe it is a good idea to recruit 1000 new graduates with no background of computer science/coding to become engineers (happens mostly in Japan). As the consequences, a large percentage of existing engineers can't even produce proper codes. "As long as they love the company and believe in our philosophy, they will overcome any obstacles", said a VP.
- Career path: what career path? there is none. After being engineers for couple of years, you will automatically become manager, and steer away from tech to management, no other choices. After that, you have to attend meaningless meetings and write useless reports.
- The company is struggling: Business is worse than ever (You can try to look for their financial report). They are basically surviving base on "Japanese use Japanese product" principal. Even that is slowly turning away from them. Recently they are cutting down people and slowing down the hiring process.
- Good people are leaving: While the company is laying off people, some are leaving on their own as well. Almost all good engineers I know already left the company ( only a couple people from my batch are remained and I believe they will leave ASAP).
- Office is over crowded: In Singapore, there are about 500 people working in 1.5 office floors in Solaris. These offices were designed to hold about 100 people per floor. The toilets cannot handle that large amount of needs.
To sum up: If you want an easy and chilling job with high pay, this might be the place. If you want to learn, to become a better engineer, Works Apps is certainly not what you are looking for.
