The company had 2 months notice of my start date, and yet it took more than two months after that before I was given a laptop that worked. The first one they gave me had already been tried and found to be too slow. It hadn't gotten any faster.
I was in company wide meetings where a handful of people found out their entire job role was changed / no longer had a team under them, via the powerpoint slide of the org chart. This was not the intention of the meeting. They had simply forgotten to tell that person. For weeks afterwards that person did not know what their new role was supposed to be.
In the interview, I was asked specifically about Typescript. When I joined I found out the entire codebase did not use Typescript. Managers were unaware.
I was told that server performance is an issue, so if I had an idea to fix it, that would be great. I went to the boss with an idea that would improve performance 3-4x (I learnt this later, from a senior architect's figures). Rather than be interested in my idea, the boss first told me I'm wrong, then argued every point, then told me I'm wasting my time on this, that no one needs to understand the technology because you can just test it, and then that I was being closed minded. Later I was told that he actually agreed with me from the start.
There are some very simple technical changes that could significantly improve the tech stack, but you've got people who proclaim to have no idea how it works, or people who are space cadets wanting to reinvent web development. As far as I can see there's no technical manager coordinating these to put the resources of each team to best use in achieving it.
You will be argued with on everything.
Simple tasks are put in POCs and stretched out to months.
I was given a very simple task in my first week, which I did. Later I found out they had meant to write something else. I was told I should have let them know that "it didn't make sense". They are clinically incapable of quietly saying "sorry, we wrote down the task incorrectly". The event repeated itself several times, (very) weirdly.
In a chat with HR, I was told that a major project was cancelled because I didn't do the work for it. I provided the screenshots to show that this was factually incorrect. Another, more senior person had been asked to do the task. They'd also fired the person who was gathering requirements for it, had no requirements for the task that was supposed to be planned by the other person, which is the real reason the project was cancelled, obviously. The screenshots made that clear, and I was fired for catching the boss in this lie.
The team worships scrum. You will spend hours estimating dull bugs, in areas of code you haven't yet touched, and assigning a fibonacci number to it, then fitting these fibonacci numbers into one week of work. If you laugh you'll be told your sarcastic attitude is a problem.
I was told to pair programme for a week because they couldn't add new tasks to our tasklist. When I asked permission to just add a new task for me to do, I was told this was impossible, and that I was acting like I was not part of the team. When I later said that I accomplished almost nothing that week due to this, I was blamed for not finding other tasks to do.
You will have discussions that border on insanity and make you want to vomit as you bite your tongue.
In my first week I was told it would be great if I could just rewrite the whole (very large) project in the latest javascript fad framework. Later I found out another team was already trying to do something similar. But no teams worked together or had an idea what they each did. After being asked to refactor theming, I joined the team who focused on that and found the leaders had been fired.
I asked several times what our long-term technical goals were, so that I could help to plan out some specific changes that would go towards this. Managers didn't know / were still figuring it out.
All of these points managers will dismiss because there is no integrity or accountability. I have a feeling it's broken at all levels.
