This was the worst software engineering job I've ever had. The reason came down to basically the worst management I've ever worked with. I have no doubt that there are other teams at this company with other managers that are great. I probably would have given 4-5 stars if I had worked on those teams. My manager's words didn't back up his actions. A shockingly immature software engineering culture was fostered despite the fact that the product we were working on was a world-class healthcare product being used in dozens of countries by millions of people. My manager was manipulative and twisted my words to seemingly always put me in a negative light. I never got decent work to do despite there being tons of opportunity that matched my skills and experience. My skills and experience were majorly overlooked and underutilized. The final straw was that despite my manager saying to me personally that I was "brilliant" and technically skilled I was threatened with a performance improvement plan. I asked my manager "Why?". My manager gave no legitimate reason. After pressing him further over several meetings I came away with the major feedback item being that I needed to format my JIRA ticket titles in a different way (which I did over the coming weeks, but is this a good reason for PIP-ing somebody?). My manager was demoted and his replacement came in and again threatened me with a performance improvement plan. I asked "why?" and he literally said. "I don't know. I was told that this was happening so I'm continuing it. Let me get back to you on that". For these reasons I left Abbott and got a promotion and pay raise in the process.
