- Whitewashing culture: VPs and EVPs will babble all day about inclusivity, mental health and a sane work-life balance. Let me laugh. I've seen trans handicapped women and racialized minorities fired a week after they come back from a short medical leave of absence (often for burnout) or after burying deceased family members.
- Managers will cling on to high performers, desperately trying to get the last drop of recognition and getting all the credit for the employees' ideas. Their only interest is going up the ladder and looking smart (to not lose their jobs despite very often offering no value.)
- Too many (bad) managers and extremely vertical hierarchy. My hat is off to the good ones but a lot of the terrible ones that have been at the company for 15+ years and only got there because of TIME and that are just trying to stay relevant. They will just wait and do whatever their director or VP says.
- A lot of the VPs and directors are also fly-by-night: they stay for a while, do the dirty job (basically always fire people and move things around), cash in and leave.
- Abuse and toxicity goes unchecked and directors will fire employees before their beloved managers. Issues brought up to directors rarely amount to anything - HR or legal seems the way to go. But they will also threaten you legally.
- Some managers, thanks to "reorgs" also don't even have direct reports, projects or even tasks or only have 4-5 team members and they just stay until they get packaged out - dragging out projects along the way to stay relevant.
- They're also pushing AI like mad. Watch out, if you have an ambitious (ambitiously desperate?) director. They will think they can do your/an highly technical job overnight. "Production? Never heard of her!"
- Not many raises or chances of getting promoted - managers will even bait and switch new hires on titles, tasks and even salary. (ie. you apply on a Senior position and they give you a non-Senior position or lateral move instead to save money - so it's VERY hard these days to leave a team.)
- On this point: they will also LIE to you to get you out of the union - and then eventually fire you
- Headcount reductions every quarter to pay shareholders dividends (they call that "reorgs" but the reorgs invariably make things worse for everybody (ie. you land in a random team that has never heard anything about your project - your boss just shrugs)
- That makes the team members varied so you can have developers and architects mixed with a bunch of trainers or strategy managers so people end up working in (very small) silos
