Many third-party organizations will issue awards if you pay them enough, and HR seems to have mastered this departmental goal. Additionally, managers direct their employees to submit positive reviews on Glassdoor.
The company's toxic culture revolves almost entirely around controlling employees. Tyrannical, dishonest, and morally bankrupt managers rule by fear rather than striving to build mutually respectful and beneficial relationships. Trust of employees is devoid with, among other examples, spyware being installed on company-issued laptops and all network traffic being decrypted. Expect to be reminded frequently that you are disposable and replaceable. The damage of high turnover and loss of institutional knowledge each time someone leaves is not recognized.
Expletive-laced dialog is the norm of many upper-level managers/directors and C-suite executives, including at company-wide meetings. Professionals should not have to endure this type of offensive language in the workplace. Apparently it is part of "company culture", as HR does not stop it, but rather members of HR are among the offenders.
Pay and benefits are insufficient to attract or retain top talent. The brain drain was accelerated as a result of forcing employees back into the office -- including those who don't work with anyone else on-site (see earlier mention of controlling employees). Anecdotally, those who have left have significantly increased their salaries (often 2X, sometimes more), gained open vacation, advanced positions in their careers, and landed full-time remote positions. Meanwhile, the vast majority of new hires appear to be visa holders, presumably desperate to meet conditions of their visas and therefore willing to accept low ball offers. To save money, seniors are being forced out and the company is now outsourcing American and Canadian jobs to India, further impacting the quality of products.
Know-it-all managers and directors with superiority complexes engage in micromanagement. Many have no education or successful experience in software architecture yet seem to believe they are God's gift to software engineering, creating Rube Goldberg designs for simple tasks, resulting in software that can neither be debugged nor maintained (yes, unqualified managers, and not architects, are designing the software). Abandoning current efforts to chase the latest shiny object at their direction ensures that the software developed never reaches a mature, stable state, or in many cases even works.
Emphasis is put on the speed of developing software, with quality not even being a distant afterthought. Engineers are disciplined for speaking up to design flaws, etc., then subsequently blamed and expected to support/fix the items when they don't work. Most days are spent putting out the resulting fires.
Agile methodologies are used, inappropriately, as justification for no planning ahead, commencing development before requirements are understood. A theme of failed requirements elicitation results in Frankenstein projects emerging from the constantly changing (and often complete reversal) of requirements. Projects are frequently scrapped due to the monumental drift. The software engineers building to the shifting requirements are often scapegoated.
Poor project management of multi-team projects results in inaccurate roadmaps. Teams are often quickly blocked on tasks by dependencies on other teams -- often for months -- resulting in deliverable dates being horribly missed. Blame is subsequently put on the blocked team, or sometimes the individual assigned to the task that was blocked, rather than acknowledge that limited resources, team capacities, and lack of coordination of dependencies across teams are the actual culprits.
Severe nepotism creates an unjust environment for the non-favored masses. Much of upper management has been populated through this nepotism via "failing up", installing individuals who are wholly unqualified for the positions they hold. The Peter principle has resulted in a few incredibly talented individuals being promoted to management positions where their skills are wasted and they are unhappy, a disservice to both the individuals and the company.
Work-life balance is non-existent. Those hired for non-support positions find this duty added after they are hired. There is no comp time for those working after hours. Even after fielding an unplanned production emergency at 2 in the morning that takes three hours to solve, those involved are still expected in the office at 8AM sharp to work the full day.
Despite the company's repeated mantra that "health and safety are our number one priority", forcing people into the office is apparently more important (see again: controlling employees). Policies and pressure exerted on employees by management (including not allowing symptomatic employees to work remotely, saying "masks should never be worn", etc.) mean all-too-frequent outbreaks of COVID-19 passed from employee to employee.
Errors on payroll and PTO accounting occur regularly. HR appears to neither notify nor correct detectable errors when they are in the company's favor unless the employee flags it. Attempting to rectify can take months and multiple iterations; eventually one gives up, calling it "close enough". Employee confidential information is also freely shared by HR and managers with inappropriate audiences.
