I was hired as part of a hiring push for a new project that was delayed by the time I joined the company.
As such, I was thrown into a heavily QA weighted team that had virtually no work for me. After I spent weeks completing copious amounts of corporate training (propaganda?), my team were scraping the bottom of the barrel to find work to keep me occupied. This mostly consisted of neglected defects first opened in the early 00s which were usually no more exciting than adding constants to an enum. As a new hire and somebody very early on in my career, I had hoped for more training and a proper introduction to the product and codebase. Instead, I was frequently thrown from one end of the system to the other with little to no explanation of what we were trying to achieve, and I was never in one place long enough to become knowledgable or proficient in any aspect of the product or code. Documentation was often lacking or out of date and colleagues were generally reluctant to have calls to explain tasks in more detail or provide guidance.
After about a year in a team that didn't need me and having made a negligible contribution, I was moved to another heavily QA weighted team that had even less programming work for me. As a result, I was handed tedious manual testing and general IT tasks to keep me busy.
I expressed my concerns about the lack of meaningful work and learning to my managers and was told that this would change once the new project for which I was originally hired started.
Eventually I lost faith that this would ever happen and I found new employment. I have never looked back. Just last Monday, I wrote more lines of code than I did in 2.5 years at Hitachi Vantara! I left having become a worse software engineer than when I joined.
A few weeks after I handed in my notice, the project was officially canned...
