Toxic culture, low quality/no leadership, low quality processes, company politics and more
Pros
- You might get the chance to work on core business system of the company. Prague is an important tech center for this major investment bank. - Salary: If you get in at the right level and change team often to chase the promotion they will not give you otherwise, you can get a good salary compared to the market
Cons
This company is full of lucky people and puppeteers. - I thing the cause of every problem of this company is the absurd low quality of leadership. In this company you can get promoted just for being at the right place at the right just for the merit of having licked somebody's butt or just because there is no choise other then promoting you as the manager left the firm. Another huge problem is that higher management don't check work quality of lower level managers. Basically if you get promoted to the first level of management you can do whatever you want in your team, create the culture that you want, the processes, workflow, and nobody will check quality of your work. Turnover is not a metric considered from higher management. Is there a team with high turnover? This is how things go, the market is to blame, the people leaving are to blame, not the lower level management. Another problem is that the company wants to centralize the decision making power over London till the bottom of the hierarchy. The consequence is that, even if you are extremely lucky to find/get a good manager, he/she will most likely not stick around for long as he will not want to be ultra micro controlled by the London based manager/puppeteer. The whole structure/culture encourage skilled managers to leave and lucky people to stay: I mean incompetent people with a weak technical career that got lucky to be promoted on the management side. Those people don't care to be just a puppet, because they know they wouldn't get same career progression and salary on the technical level or the managerial level in an healty company. So incompetent people are left to lead the teams and consequences are catastrofic. - Result of above problem is the amount and variety of toxicity. I am not sure I can remember and mention everything. After three years I have seen a lot. Engineering manager is a though job. If you are a lucky person(see above point) you will be overwhelm by the challanges. The quickest and lazier solution to each of them will be your solution of choise all the time. The satisfaction of puppetteer's requests the only ambition of your working day. This leads to problems - Team's culture: forget the seniors and lead tech mentoring and coaching juniors and new joiners. The only performance metric will be the amount of tasks/story points delivered. forget knowledge transfer and team working of any sort. With the lucky person judging your work, contributing to a friendly and supportive culture will be a waste of time. You get the chance to blame a colleague because he couldn't do a task or didn't know an info? you do it because the lucky person will get his life easier in judging people's performance. You have the chance to showcase your performance mentioning microscopic actions you have taken during the day in the stand up? you do it! you get the chance of complaining, blaming, whining, crying during retrospective/1to1s to highlight how "performative" you are in comparison to others? hell you do it! you get the chance to ignore a private message of an help request from a colleague? you got the point. - Processes and best practice: with the lucky person in command of a team, good quality processes are not an option. The lucky person has not even experience with good quality processes or processes at all. The lucky person knows that the puppetteer expects standups so he will turn them into an opportunity of micro controlling to the core everybody. What's the progres with task XXX-YYY? Any blockers? How long do you need? ASAP here ASAP there, ASAP every where. You get slowed down by a broken process/workflow? who cares? the only things that matter to the lucky persons are Deadlines and ASAPs? Improving processes is not an option. It requires work from the lucky person. Most likely he will gaslight you, minimizing any cultural/process/workflow (motivated) critics, reflecting his reponsibilities on you ("there is no problem, but even if there was a problem, this is you and I am so kind to help with the solution: deliver more story points", based on a true story). Similar approach to things like workflows, branching approach, jira task lifecycle, sprint planning, estimation sessions, 1to1s and so on... - Technical debt: With the lucky person on command, good quality code, practices, processes are not an option(see above points). This leads to an absurd amount of technical debts. Doing any change, even one liners, testing your stuff, deploying into dev, then to prod, will require a ridiculus amount of work. Applications are not designed with testing in mind, they have almost not testing and most likely they will expect you to add them. Testing an application that is not designed to be testable is a pain. Doing with all the ASAPs and VPN connection issues, the DEV server that is broken, no team working and all issues above is a pain. - I am sure there is more, like arrogant people in leadership positions, IT support teams not replying emails and requests for weeks or months, difficulty to be promoted, the office life that is awful with people talking loudly in open spaces, we don't have fixed desks anymore so we need to reserve it for every single day and you will find somebody at your desk, more more and more, can't remember everything but just google "toxic working culture" on google and you will find accurate description of this company.
