Target reviews

Since there is nothing much to do, and lots of coffee to drink when not doing it, there's a lot of time on people's hands to create politics at every level. In my team, which is a technical team, they change the leader every quarter on some pretext or the other, much of the time it is clear that the leader in Minneapolis needs some local Lackey and keeps changing their mind on whom. There is no roadmap as much though there are many meetings around it, because there's 5 managers for every engineer or analyst or working employee. These managers keep 1/1s that are recurring , they also keep 3-4 on 1s and then many on many meetings. Every two quarters, they start a re architecture road map, no one knows what's the difference between re-arching ring, refactoring, and just coding. The SVP says things like we are number 1 in selling swimwear, thanks to you all your efforts, to the engineering teams that have no idea why their efforts led to selling swim wear. She started many efforts that failed I hear, so she's been rewarded with running digital which is code for internet commerce. We are all in one happy mess, but there's TT, free food, access to compute, and coffee. So we are here trying to make the best of those.

Most workers have always lived in Minnesota and never worked anywhere besides Target, so there is immediate suspicion of any outside ideas, and the need to "achieve consensus" (i.e., offend no one) is paramount. Diversity is emphasized but only in skin color, sex and sexual orientation; diversity of thought, communication styles, or personality is heavily discouraged. If you have worked outside Minnesota, you can come out of meetings thinking "Am I crazy, or am I the only one here that isn't crazy?" If you are Minnesota Nice and are fun at happy hours, you will be sent on the rocket ship to advancement no matter the quality of your work or your expertise. But if you are introverted and don't put on the show, or ever push back or challenge your manager, you are branded as Not A Team Player and your career plateaus. Open offices mean introverts (and extroverts who just need to concentrate to actually get stuff done) have to disappear to a quiet room or work from home off-hours. The work culture emphasizes "the Target personality" over deep proficiency at the job. This means that being a high-performing individual contributor is subtly discouraged, because you will have very limited career progression opportunities. This also means that midlevel management is largely made of Target generalists who are out of their depth in subject matter expertise.