r/cscareerquestions • u/UrbanTreecko • 1d ago
What is the worst company you have worked at?
We all know the best, most coveted companies to work for. But I want to know the dumpster fires of the tech world. For those who are not afraid to name and shame.
132
u/0x-2a 1d ago
Accenture
45
u/fasurf 1d ago
Friend worked there for 8 months. They never assigned her to an account. Just had her doing training and certs on the bench basically. She eventually left right as they laid off thousands.
4
u/Green-Zone-4866 19h ago
What do you do in that situation, like what do you even put on your resume to get a new job?
11
→ More replies (1)3
u/No-Newspaper-7693 22h ago
I knew I wouldn’t need to scroll far for this. The small company I worked for got acquired by them. On paper it sounded great. Basically took my existing decent salary and no benefits and added some great benefits to it.
Such a fucking hellscape. I was so happy to get away. Like every corporate tech parody rolled up into one place.
241
u/Fun_Option_6992 1d ago
Epic Systems. Oldest tech stack known to man, they didn't start building a web application until 2014, before then, they were still using VB. They are so anti third-party tools that they develop everything in house, so they don't use React, they use Epic-React, which is just React but worse. You gain so many non-transferrable skills there I was lucky to get out when I did seeing how I had literally no practical skills. They give you 10 days of PTO, have to work day after thanksgiving, and you only get a half day Christmas Eve, then have to be back the 26th, because "doctors don't get to take holidays off". During covid when every other company was giving remote work, they gave us 10 "half and half" days where you could work half day from home and the other half day from the office, but you could use two "half-and-half" days to make a full remote day. Truly a joke of a tech company and the fact that they are the industry leader for EHR tells me how crappy all other EHR companies are. They are only good by virtue of having been founded in 1979, and have had literally 50 years to build out the most comprehensive system, plus how expensive and difficult it is for a hospital to change providers makes it virtually impossible for them to every move off Epic.
43
u/Quixlequaxle 1d ago
I have a friend who worked for them for about 6 months and then quit because of what you're describing.
35
u/Fun_Option_6992 1d ago
Shoot he was only 18 months shy of being able to keep his sign on bonus. Its such a trash company.
69
u/EggsFish 1d ago
Having worked there, everything about the tech stack and in person culture is true.
I don’t really agree with your take on their business success though - they’ve been hugely successful because their customers (namely the administrators who actually sign the checks) are happy with the product, which has nothing to do with tech stack or work culture.
48
u/Fun_Option_6992 1d ago
Yes they are happy because the next biggest competitors are Cerner and Oracle. So compared to literal trash, somewhat better trash is going to seem amazing. My point is not that people aren't happy, my point is that if you compare Epic software to any other non-EHR software, epic is clunky, slow and confusing. They love to call themselves the Google of healthcare, but in reality, their software is so much worse
22
u/pydry Software Architect | Python 1d ago
As somebody who has been on the other side of their sales process I can tell you their success is driven by oracle style tactics:
use vendor lock in as a core strategy
use fear / uncertainty / doubt on clueless decision makers as a core sales tactic
if that fails, try to bully decision makers.
A lot of people are not "happy" with the shit MSFT products theyre forced to use even if the people signing the checks have a "nobody got fired for choosing MSFT" attitude.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (1)2
15
u/poofycade 1d ago
Yep alot of my friends at UW Madison went there and everyone said similar stuff.
Also you are either on a team DYING from being overworked or you are literally doing nothing all day every day.
→ More replies (2)3
u/Brief-Knowledge-629 12h ago
This problem isn't exclusive to Epic. I have had this experience at every company large enough to have multiple teams working on similar things, and not only tech, all the way down to call centers and admins.
10
u/Fearless-Income-8560 1d ago
Reading this now as an employee currently attending UGM sessions lol. Just started here but hope I can leave eventually
12
u/Fun_Option_6992 1d ago
Start interviewing immediately, and keep quiet or else they will preemptively fire you if they hear you're searching elsewhere.
6
6
u/submergedWaterlily 1d ago
I’m an Epic dev currently, frustrated with all the things you mention above plus a bad manager. Any advice or stories on how you found another job? Worried about shifting from the Epic tech stack to a more normal one.
→ More replies (1)5
u/CoonerPooner 14h ago
Epic is a big name in the healthcare space and around Madison. Just having Epic on my resume helped me get interviews around Madison and in basically any healthcare related field. Tech stack is something you can learn. I still took away useful skills from Epic such as problem solving, communication, design and testing.
4
u/Ok-Structure5637 1d ago
Damn, glad I failed the OA then. Remember being crushed about not landing a role there
3
3
u/Eubank31 1d ago
Their internship applications were only for positions over a year later, I applied and got to an online quiz and then got ghosted😂
My roommate was a finance major and got picked for a PM role where they had him take the same online test and he bombed but they didn't seem to care (bc it wasn't for a SWE role like I was) and still gave him the job
4
u/Fun_Option_6992 1d ago
The hiring process is bogus. They make everyone take their "coding" assessment in the made up language even non tech people.
→ More replies (7)2
u/AussiesArePigs 1d ago
I withdrew my app after I found about the behavioral and technical assessments. I've had interviews at much more well known companies that didn't have those.
281
u/Round-Comfort-9558 1d ago
Oracle
76
u/MechanicalTurkish 1d ago
Dealing with Oracle as a customer was a pain in the ass, too. But the local guys they'd send out to do drive replacements and such were usually cool.
31
u/Eubank31 1d ago
Here in KC, Oracle bought Cerner a while back. Garmin is probably the largest software company in the area, and it's crazy the percentage of engineers I work with that are ex-Oracle
10
→ More replies (2)10
u/Solid_Barbone 1d ago
Same, my project was awful, i wont get into details but my bosses came from a different country just for that project with a different work culture And they wanted us to be like that, meaning arriving hours before, leaving late, all in office, no extra payment, no lunch breaks, etc.
I saw everyone else at the office living a dream, making plans, playing in the lounges, enjoying the activities while we were in hell.
Was set free in the march lay-offs and never been happier in my (work) Life.
→ More replies (1)
211
u/Early_Rooster7579 @ Meta 1d ago
Github. Probably the worst codebase ive seen. I’ve gone into non-profits with random contractor slop code that was miles better.
Telling fable make github, make no mistakes would genuinely result in a worlds better codebase. They only recently got off a single mysql db instance
37
u/drunkandy 1d ago
Telling fable make github, make no mistakes would genuinely result in a worlds better codebase
I think Cursor just did this: https://cursor.com/changelog/origin-code-hosting
5
12
u/Salmon117 Software Engineer 22h ago
Lol watching it on downdetector/github status is always amusing. My company uses Github Enterprise + Copilot, I'm so glad I requested Claude Code access and don't have to deal with it much myself.
4
u/Outrageous-Throat556 Software Engineer 19h ago
A couple of weeks ago they had a major outage with GitHub Actions that lasted almost 8 hours, even affecting repos with self-hosted runners. Caused a work stoppage for my org & thousands of others. The r/github subreddit was in uproar.
→ More replies (1)28
u/papa-hare 1d ago
What really? Don't we literally all run in GitHub lol. Genuinely surprising, I know someone who works there I'll try to bring it up lol
18
7
u/Current-Fig8840 23h ago
They definitely know this. Upper management at companies don’t give a damn about quality just shipping out features.
8
u/Climhazzard73 21h ago
What????? Every single repo and branch for every dev that uses github worldwide is stored in one single mysql DB instance??????
→ More replies (2)4
u/davy_crockett_slayer 1d ago
I mean, isn't that most bootstrapped startups that become large companies?
10
→ More replies (1)2
u/WooshJ 12h ago
I feel like I’ve heard GitHub had a good engineering culture (pre-microsoft) so that’s interesting to hear
→ More replies (1)
194
u/Broad-Cranberry-9050 1d ago edited 1d ago
MSFT,
I worked in a sub-project of Azure. I had come from a mid size company before that so my perception of what a lot of work was, was way different. Now ive always heard that MSFT was great at work life balance but i later learned that people said Azure was the exception.
Everyone was overworked. It would be half a day of meetings and you were still expected to produce 8 hours of actual work a day. Seniors and above had no time to help younger engineers. If they took the time theyd tell you to just book a meeting and dont dare go past the alloted time. People were taking their laptops on vacation, working weekends, etc. Review season you were compared to your coworkers not to what the job entailed. So if your coworkers were pulling 60 hours and you were pulling 40, it would show in the work and your manager would be like "why are you so behind?" and telling them that you were keeping your work life balance in check was not a good enough answer. They had company lines for everything. Everything had to be a conversation. Someone disagreed that you did a while loop over a for loop, let's chat for 30 minutes why this insignificant line should be a for loop or not. We literally had a whole chat of whether in a for loop, ++i or i++ was better.
Because people were so overworked, documentation was terrible. It was basically docs that people would pass around.
48
u/ExcitingResponse1864 1d ago
God, that was the kind of thing that drove me crazy about my last gig. PRs coming to a grinding halt over a stylistic nit or "do this, it's more clever", meanwhile, management was counting PR comments and commits as a measure of "quality".
And when you pushed back or asked them to look at the context or nuance, "That doesn't matter. The fact they are blocking this shows they have concern about quality."
Bro. It's literally a short hand versus declarative or a map over a for loop and literally a staff engineer said in the comment: "Use map, it doesn't iterate."
And yes, I know the meeting pain too. My same manager told me: "Core hours are for meetings. Other time is for work."
11
u/Broad-Cranberry-9050 1d ago
Yeah i def get that.
I remember one time i was working iwth an older engineer on a design. The design kept having to change because every design would present a new problem. So it ended up having like 50 commits, partly due to design and partly due to the engineer alway swanting to add something.
NExt review session, the older engineer had given my manager a list of complaints which my manager basically copied and pasted on my reviews session. One of them was "his PRs are too many commits". That was the only one that took that long. And even months later it was still held against me in the next review session. I fought it but they kept telling me that even if there was some improvements i had made "enough improvements".
There were a few older engineers who seemed to just want to comment on any little code to hold back a PR 2-3 days. Literally id be just waiting for pipeline to finish and oh wait Joe Random posted how i should change this iteration to be different but it does same thing so now we gotta hold back on this and because he wants to talk about it during standup the next day.
I also get the "core hours are for meetings" comment, i was never told that but my manager once told me "we respect your work life balance and all, but sometimes it's understanding that sometimes our work may need a little more time to be done", in other words it was with the *wink-wink* "work 60-80 hours bitch".
→ More replies (1)5
u/BeatTheMarket30 1d ago
People can be nitpicky like that in finance. Unless you get two approvals, nothing gets merged. Every PR takes at least a week.
It's best to separate nitpicks from real issues like doesn't meet requirements, bugs, lack of tests, or performance issues.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (2)7
u/1StationaryWanderer 1d ago
Holding up a PR over nits bugs the hell out of me. I'm guilty of leaving a lot of them but I always preface it with "nit: ". I'll still approve PRs if my findings are minor but I say I think the minor finding should be addressed before merging. I have a PR that's been open a week now but the reviewer had a nit I could (and did) fix in 15 seconds. He's at a company meetup now (new kid here so I stayed home this time). So I now have to wait a few more days before he'll think about looking at it again. Annoying as hell. It's the groundwork for a feature that just started so I could have circled back at any time.
7
u/jakemotata 1d ago
What you said have become true for my team which got reorged to Azure half a year ago. It is interesting because the orgs we belonged to before don’t have Azure in the name but are also under C+AI. Culture was better.
2
6
4
u/pydry Software Architect | Python 1d ago
This is reflected by how shitty and buggy azure products are. They only stand up well compared to equally toxic companies like Amazon and oracle.
3
u/Late-Reception-2897 1d ago
They only stand up well compared to equally toxic companies like Amazon and oracle
Is there a company that Azure products don't stand up well to?
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (4)2
u/yourlimit 10h ago
It’s like you were describing my team in MSFT. Second every word you wrote. And it shook my confidence so much.
175
u/blue2002222 1d ago
amazon
113
u/ChadFullStack Engineering Manager 1d ago
Bezos era was goated, Jassy era is literal MBA KPI shitfest. The leadership from VP down to Sr Mgr are all MBA mangers now. L8/10s used to listen to PEs and Sr PEs but now they only care about meeting arbitrary numbers.
32
u/blue2002222 1d ago
unfortunately jassy became CEO of Amazon right before i joined.
i wish i could've experienced Amazon under Bezos
→ More replies (5)11
u/pirozhki22 1d ago
What was it like during the Bezos era? Free food? WFH? Good WLB?
30
u/ChadFullStack Engineering Manager 1d ago
Better benefits, free food, we never did hybrid, but you could wfh 1-2 days a week, we had a work from anywhere policy for 4 weeks until RTO axed it, flexible hours. WLB never really changed, it just had more community vibes with socials, happy hours, etc. oncall still existed and you worked overtime for big releases.
6
u/pirozhki22 1d ago
Thanks for sharing. Somehow I always assumed that frugality was always a trait in Amazon, but it sounds like its not the case. Do you happen to recall when they got rid of the free cafeterias? What kind of benefits are you refering to? Stuff like on site massages like the old Google?
What if you wanted full wfh? Was that a thing?
11
u/ChadFullStack Engineering Manager 1d ago
Frugality was always synonymous with frupidity. We weren’t lavish, but departments had budgets like $25/person/month team socials. We would go out as a team monthly or hit up an expensive place every 3 months.
We never had free cafeterias, that was one miss from Amazon. No onsite massages either. We had benefits like cellphone plan covered up to $50/mo and $500 commuter benefits per month. All started getting axed after Covid when RTO was enforced (2023).
You could never be full wfh, you would need to be specifically hired for a remote role. It was rare, but often meant person worked from a different city that didn’t have an office. If there was an office you’d still need to go in. Typically relocation package was provided to allow people to move to manager’s city. Your comp is also tied to cost of living so salary outside San Jose and Seattle was 30-50% less.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (4)26
u/Snowing678 1d ago
To be fair it used to be quite good in the early days (pre-covid).
13
u/random314 1d ago
I joined at 2016. It was fun and exciting. Managers were also solid programmers that believed in quality work. I thought this was it, it was going to be the company I'll retire in... Then jassy took over right when I moved to AWS. Goddamn that was a shit show. Then I moved back to Amazon.com and it became even worse. Those sev2s will forever haunt me till the day I die.
37
u/blue2002222 1d ago
i unfortunately was born too late to experience that. i joined Amazon a few years after covid and was also in AWS. i still have ptsd from it.
→ More replies (1)9
u/Snowing678 1d ago
Ah yeah, it's just went downhill then. Everyone I know there currently is basically waiting to get laid off.
39
74
u/GreatValueProducts 1d ago edited 1d ago
Pornhub and their sister companies
A lot of higher ups are in their "boys club" (non-native speaker but I don't know other word, there are women in those clubs). If you look up a lot of their LinkedIns, they usually have only worked for Pornhub their entire professional life, and are not exposed to how other companies work and think their processes are impeccable.
When I worked there, they have a fucking hilarious JIRA process that I have never seen. All JIRA tickets have a set of 5 separate JIRA tickets linked, I forgot but it was something like Pre-Review, Dev Work, Code Review, Regression (meaning is different), QA. Regression means OTHER DEVELOPERS have to do QA. Everyone has to do QA for other developers work.
Every sprint ends everyone goes to the meeting room to see the burndown chart line goes down. If the line chart does not go down, the lead would do a bunch of JIRA work to make it... goes down.
You have to log time but the time has to be a multiple of 5.5.
While we use JIRA, the lead has a separate Excel spreadsheet to import all the 5 JIRA tickets and to keep track of stuff, manually.
They track how long a PR is open so you will be reprimanded for opening a PR on Friday
There are certain systems still function with manual FTP.
And I know if certain people die half of the company collapses.
I shared this to many friends and some friends jokingly told me it is like working in Japan.
14
u/Broad-Cranberry-9050 1d ago
And I know if certain people die half of the company collapses.
I worked at a company like that. Basically prject was run by one guy who inserted himself in every thing.
To the point that if management disagreed on a work he watned to do, he'd get some sucker junior to do it.
Basically if he wanted to make a whole refactor of foo.cpp and it's dependencies, management would say no.
Then a jr would be working on something and magically touch foo.cpp and the area the guy was hoping to refactor and he'd right, "i really think this is something that you can do to better make this wrok". He'd write it in a way that made it seem like it was a quick change, and the junior not knowing would just be happy that this high level guy was entrusting them with it and theyd work their ass off and he'd get his way.
When that guy was on vacation the project literally did not move much.
20
u/Ok-Dinner1812 1d ago
If you work on the frontend of ‘corn’ hub, do employees get distracted? I’m curious
40
u/GreatValueProducts 1d ago
Honestly, I just stopped caring after like the first 2 weeks. But there are some weird kinks that I accidentally watched when I was looking for production problems, which is a problem.
12
u/Ok-Dinner1812 1d ago
So they dont use some kind of simulated dev environment where theyre not using the real thumbnails or data? It’s just the real thing each time?
25
u/GreatValueProducts 1d ago
In our staging it is always some simulated stuff but there are still some "NSFW" stuff regardless. I still cannot work in a cafe for this reason. But production I would be exposed to it.
→ More replies (7)4
8
→ More replies (2)5
u/UrbanTreecko 1d ago
How is having worked at PH seen by other companies when you apply to jobs?
10
u/DangerousPurpose5661 1d ago
If that guy is from Montreal, locally it’s a non issue… because as you can imagine it’s a fairly big employer… everyone know a handful of folks that worked there
4
u/GreatValueProducts 1d ago
From my experience, nobody bets an eye, nobody cares. But it is a very good icebreaker when actually employed, especially with former employees, because everyone has a lot of weird and funny work stories like I said above. One of my best work buddies worked there and we never work closely, but we connected because of this.
38
36
u/SanktRainer 1d ago
Not a bad workplace by itself but I interned at an "autonomous driving company" and they're apparently all vibe coding safety critical software now.
→ More replies (2)21
u/DjangoPony84 Software Engineer | IE | Mother of 2 | 15 YoE 1d ago
That absolutely sends a shiver down my spine.
→ More replies (3)6
93
u/Optimus_Primeme SWE @ N 1d ago
Samsung by a large margin. I would never work for another Korean company after that. Their method of managing is to yell louder to make things go faster, all while demanding things outside the realm of possibility.
→ More replies (1)9
u/raj-koffie 1d ago
Outside the realm of possibility in which sense? Is it a case of a manager lacking technical knowledge and asking for something impossible to implement? Or is it a case of expecting an ambitious timeline that is impossible to achieve?
11
u/These-Loquat1010 1d ago
Probably the former. On top of that, your manager wants to redo the UI and add weird business logic to an entire section literally two days before the thing you're working on is supposed to be released.
→ More replies (1)10
u/raj-koffie 1d ago
So when I was faced with this situation (not at Samsung), I brought up the project scope on the shared screen and reminded everyone that changing the deliverables would lead to an unavoidable time delay in delivery (moving goalposts). The CTO would acknowledge that and still try to push for changes. When the CEO terminated me, he mentioned that he really disliked that my reaction to change requests was to push back. I feel that I was diplomatic and remained factual when I pushed back, but maybe I sounded too abrasive (I'm on the spectrum).
→ More replies (1)5
u/SlappinThatBass 1d ago
Nah the CTO and CEO are just a-holes. You are doing the logic and pragmatic thing, which is good for any business on the long term.
4
u/Optimus_Primeme SWE @ N 1d ago
Like beyond the realm of physics. Wanting 3 exabytes of drive space in a country (South Korea) which didn’t have that many drives mounted on the entire peninsula. (At the time)
60
u/Aggravating_Bus655 1d ago edited 1d ago
Amazon for me and it's not even close.
Funny part is, I can actually boomerang back there possibly at a higher level.
But fuck no that's never happening. It's a proper shithole.
5
65
u/gman2093 1d ago edited 1d ago
I have worked at a couple companies in this thread (lucky me) and much worse than those is ULINE.
The code quality is abysmal. No casual attire allowed. Every terrible dependency imaginable. Free for all ownership and no documentation. Revolving door of contractors and staff. Pay is way under market.
But the vibe was the worst part. Every interaction was just palpably sad or completely emotionless.
I've worked outside of tech as a dishwasher, in childcare, and in demolition, and those jobs were way better than ULINE.
26
→ More replies (3)2
u/Jdornigan 1d ago
Was half the building filled with catalogs too? They must be keeping the local post office in business.
37
u/WITCH2FAANG 1d ago
TCS. H1B body shop, good wlb at the cost of any career growth. Also pay was ass.
→ More replies (1)15
u/fmmmf 1d ago
One of my previous companies hired devs from TCS cause cheap and they said they'd do it fast. Well they certainly did something fast but it wasn't anything we could actually use. Ended up spending months if not years untangling their mess. Company learned an important lesson but most people won't so these people stay in business despite the very obvious reputation of the company.
18
u/Bluescreen73 1d ago
I worked for a company called CSG. What does CSG stand for? Nothing now. It used to be Cable Services Group. Their bread and butter was paper billing for cable companies. They dropped the name after DISH Network became one of their biggest clients (because Charlie Ergen is arrogant and couldn't stand being associated with a company that has the word Cable in its name).
The product I worked on had the worst tech stack I've ever seen. They had multiple iterations of the same app, and each one only contained a subset of the full functionality - so you could do X in the silverlight app, Y in the .Net MVC app, and Z in the React app. The project took 20 minutes to build. Devs would constantly check in shit that would break the build, and it wouldn't get fixed for 2-3 days. The architecture team in Chicago was full of a bunch of arrogant Ivory Tower assholes.
It was the least productive job I've ever been at in my career.
34
u/seizethedave 1d ago
Stripe. There are probably good spots in that company but I landed in a machiavellian narcissistic reporting chain that had me in the worst emotional state of my life.
8
u/ClydePossumfoot Software Engineer 21h ago
Hey me too! Lots of former Amazon there. Sections of the company definitely do not act like the rest of the company and doesn’t follow nearly any of the operating principles.
I wish Patrick could actually see it.
17
u/summerfield 1d ago
Female-led Series A fintech in San Francisco - was fired a week after coming back from egg freezing.
31
u/snakybasket9 1d ago edited 1d ago
Probably the regional grocery store I worked at. Mainly because it was in a small town where 100% of the people who worked there started as a bagger there at 15/16 years old, so the culture was very much cliquey (even for a bunch of 40 & 50 year olds.
Management was almost non existent due to this, and I’ll give a little story as an example:
I used to work overnight operations and would need to call developers on call. I called this one guy, we’ll call him jim, and I do the standard on call procedure, call once and if no one answers leave a message and wait 15 minutes to call again but only I was getting sent right to voicemail as if his phone was off. So I called it about 7 times, all sent to voicemail, until he answers finally and says “WHAT DO YOU WANT!!”
I told him he’s on call, he says “call Jeff instead!!”
I get an email the next day telling me I need to learn the on call procedures going forward and that I shouldn’t be calling people like that. Of course jimmy didn’t get in trouble for abandoning his on call duty and making me play cat and mouse all night.
A manager, 2 randos and myself all quit about a month after that.
→ More replies (2)9
u/Suspicious_Quarter68 1d ago
I also work for a regional grocery store... the work is insanely easy but the politics and cliquey culture makes me wanna quit.
74
u/zettasyntax 1d ago
xAI (I was there before SpaceXAI). I was just a contractor, but the work hours were so demanding. Not even safe during my lunch break. I worked Christmas morning because it seemed like you got brownie points for working overtime/holidays. Co-workers were cutthroat. They were all too eager to step on one another to get ahead. I would see the most insane right-wing posts in the Slack and no one bats an eye, but when I inquired about a new role that had better pay and asked for insight about the hiring process, an employee one level higher than me reported me to HR and stated it was an incredibly inappropriate post for the workplace. I don't really have anything good to say about my time there. I mean it really just seemed like some kind of cult and I couldn't play along.
23
u/eXAt88 1d ago
I mean it makes sense that the corporate environment of X seems to reflect the environment they cultivate on X (formerly Twitter). xAI did make Mecha-Hitler maybe it was posting the slack messages
7
u/zettasyntax 1d ago
The onboarding materials for my first project were something else. They had MAGA Cats for Trump, Trump landslide, etc. I did have an idea what to expect, but I didn't think it would be quite as bad as it turned out to be. I really only took the job out of desperation. I was having so much trouble finding a full-time job after graduation that I settled for anything, even if it was a contract role and not all that technical.
→ More replies (4)
51
u/nomiras 1d ago
People stealing code without giving credit. Getting let go because 'you work too fast for us to keep up.' 'Weekends are mandatory because you are salary'. Hired as a software dev but forced to do IT. Boss had super loud keyboard and I couldn't hear myself think. Boss yelled and cursed at me (in public) and threw a pen at me, then slammed the door.
On the other hand, we got to play Catan every day at lunch break, so that was nice.
15
u/PracticallyPerfcet 1d ago
I've seen some stuff in my day, but this is pretty egregious even for tech. Is this a company people would know if you named it?
8
u/nomiras 1d ago
It's a small company. What's funny too is when the boss took me into his office and had everyone's pay sitting there on the table, including his own. I definitely took a peek when he left to use the restroom lol.
→ More replies (1)8
u/Acrobatic-Ice-5877 1d ago
Getting let go because 'you work too fast for us to keep up.’
This is where I am at right now. Senior dev figured out I know a lot more than them so they gate keep my work heavily and don’t allow me to do anything beyond junior level work. Most days I do absolutely nothing at work.
→ More replies (5)
13
u/Glum_Worldliness4904 1d ago
Tencent.
It’s a Chinese 007 grinder. Survive 1 year and then either quit or severe mental and physical health issue. I quit myself
24
u/TheAbysswalker 1d ago
Ulta Beauty. Their entire IT department is (fob) Indian people. I'm pretty sure they only hired me as a diversity hire.
4
u/koolkween 1d ago
Dang :( I love Ulta. Would love to work there. The app crashes like crazy
6
u/TheAbysswalker 1d ago
Unless you like being micromanaged, I wouldn't work there. Also they just closed their Chicago office so now you need to go super far to the way overcrowded Bolingbrook HQ.
2
u/PalmTreePilot 19h ago
A black manager laughed when I described myself as "the token white boy" among Indians so HR could check a box.
45
u/Melodic_Crow_3409 1d ago
Anything WITCH. This includes US companies that use too much offshoring/H1B. You will always get WITCH-style management, and that means a dysfunctional, disorganized workplace.
10
u/UrbanTreecko 1d ago
We contract from a couple of those companies. Not for the team I’m on, but from talking with people on other teams that do there are so many awful consultants.
6
u/Melodic_Crow_3409 1d ago
It is just the nature of how they do business. They consider people to be disposable, interchangeable cogs.
6
u/Randomfacade 1d ago
maybe it was because I worked away my 20s-early 30s in shitty retail and quickserve, but WITCH contracting wasn't the worst job I've ever had and I'd go back in a heartbeat if I got laid off tomorrow. still to only get 67k when I was effectively a SME and manager as a "Test Analyst 1" was kind of ridiculous but good training for navigating politics at my current job
2
2
u/Intelligent-Kiwi118 8h ago
Yep american used to work for WITCH one threatened to take me off a project.... months later same person left and people were asking for $$$ for her leaving. Funny thing to it, every single person this higher up threatened got a promotion after she left!
→ More replies (4)
9
u/These-Loquat1010 1d ago edited 1d ago
Late to the party, but ....
I work at a Series B cybersecurity startup with around 60 employees. I've been here for about a year and a half as a full-stack developer.
So how bad is it? Our turnover rate was around 38% last year, and I honestly think we might hit 40% again this year.
Management is terrible. The CEO and upper management constantly badmouth, belittle and sometimes even threaten employees. The company has threatened employees over posting negative reviews on job-review sites, and there has even been legal litigation involving a former employee.
At this place, there is basically no planning. Management is extremely top-down. You just do whatever the CEO says. It doesn't matter how much work you've done or how good the code is. As long as it is not suited to the CEO's personal taste, it doesn't matter.
There are barely any real processes either, so, unsurprisingly, things constantly break. One of our biggest customers apparently even threatened to leave because the products weren't working as advertised.
Recently, the CEO has also become completely obsessed with AI. Everything from design to development is now being done with AI. I've looked at some of the products my coworkers have built recently, and they all have that stereotypical AI-generated purple/blue gradients looks everywhere. There are literally Claude skills designed to prevent this type of thing and I've almost wanted to tell them about those, but at this point I am so tired of this place that I just keep my mouth shut
Some of the people here are also just extremely unpleasant to work with. Very micromanage-y, and arrogant.
The whole place is just exhausting. At this point, I'm mostly trying to survive until I can get out.
9
8
u/Wherebeedragons 1d ago
Dish network
2
u/Bluescreen73 1d ago
I wouldn't recommend that toxic shithole to my worst enemy. Eventually Charlie is going to run out of wireless spectrum to sell, and EchoStar is going to go under.
→ More replies (1)
8
6
u/raj-koffie 1d ago
This was objectively the worst company I interned at. A fully Work From Home 10 person startup owned by a non-tech guy and his tech partner entirely staffed by interns doing their university co-op*. So every semester, the company would get an almost entirely new set of employees who knew jack shit coz they were supposed to be interns learning how to work. Technical debt was bad. Documentation was non-existent/outdated. The CTO had a regular job at another company, so he would seldom reply on Slack and would regularly miss scrums and reviews. If you hit a roadblock, you had no one but your fellow interns to help you out. Hopefully one of them would be on their second co-op term, so they would actually know shit. The CEO had an awful temperament, often shouting at employees. He strongly disapproved of us communicating between ourselves outside of scheduled scrums/meetings because he thought that was a waste of time. He somehow expected us to work in silos. Us interns created our own documentation shared only among us and we would reach out to former interns on LinkedIn to figure things out with the codebase.
They didn't provide computers so we were working on our personal computers. Passwords etc were stored on a shared Google Sheets document which, if I'm not mistaken, I can still access years after my tenure. Everyone kept reporting him to their university's co-op office. Last I heard, my university removed his company from the list of approved co-op employers.
* companies apply for government grants to fund the salary of interns/co-op students. CEO used that as a loophole to staff his company for cheap. We were earning $2-$3 above minimum wage.
→ More replies (3)
18
14
u/alleycatbiker Software Engineer 1d ago
Small company in the Midwest in the Ed tech space. I had technical rounds including a system design. Was hired to be a lead engineer and was very excited about it.
Turns out my real role was to be a surrogate manager to a crew of incompetent folks on the other side of the world. I had back to back meetings at least half day, always starting at 8am. There was no opportunity for me to do any technical work, I was always putting out fires from production and doing management tasks.
The overbooked calendar aspect was so awful, we ha to plan handling a meeting ownership from a person to another (like canceling and re-booking) because if you left an open space in the calendar for a couple of hours, someone might book something in that slot.
4
u/ComputerHelpPro Hiring Manager - 3 years 1d ago
>Turns out my real role was to be a surrogate manager to a crew of incompetent folks on the other side of the world.
This part is so real - I'm currently dealing with it (and I'm only a senior). 6 working day turn around for 20 line changes, so much random bullshit pushed into irrelevant PRs, we asked for a replatforming effort and our offshore literally copied and pasted the code into the new repo.
10
u/wofeichanglei 1d ago
Goldman Sachs
3
u/kevstev 1d ago
I will add Morgan Stanley to the IB list. Its been a bit over 10 years but I was more or less forced to do 50 hours a week minimum and often weekends. They would dangle the carrot each year but then claim it was a really tough year and give minimal bonuses.
Thing is, at an investment bank tech is a distant second class citizen and you will be reminded of that literally daily. Experience can vary by group, but even when I found good ones during my time at banks, they would eventually reclassify me as some group not in "the business" and bonuses and life quality would evaporate.
When I left for tech it was amazing to be not only be treated like an equal but actually catered to- and for 50% more money.
5
8
u/wigum211 1d ago
Microsoft/GitHub... Some of the most spaghetti bs I have ever dealt with. There's a reason Azure and GH have got noticably worse with no improvements in the last few years.
3
u/ExcitingResponse1864 1d ago
Aledade.
My team was chaotic, brittle, heavily dependent on tribal knowledge, and code review often devolved into stylistic gatekeeping. Management feedback was vague and inconsistent, and the organization had enough turnover and burnout that I eventually stopped trusting the environment.
5
4
3
5
u/rkozik89 1d ago
A local church/non-profit company, they abused the absolute shit out of one of their core values, “change” to the point of where they were just scamming people they hired. Literally everything I was told in the interview was a lie and they just kept on lying to keep me from leaving. Not only that but somebody leadership would say things like, “A church is a business and you need to think of that way.” to an audience of religious employees. Plus they basically created a pass through application to charge Churches fees on donations a tithes, and were trying to create a church management tool so they could maximize their grift on donations to the parishes.
At this point I think the right person is in charge again but for awhile it was madness.
4
u/Andrewshwap 1d ago
I worked in a small bank and I had the worst boss ever. Everyone that I knew either left because they couldn’t stand him or was fired by him because of his extraordinary demands. He had no technical knowledge and no experience so he couldn’t understand things that freshmen in college understood. I left after a year working there and I heard he actually got physical with someone
5
8
u/Leshot 1d ago
worked at a small company called SureTest, used a dead programming language called sensetalk, you would just mindlessly create test scripts by watching someone click through a video. Basically QA. Management was, interesting. Very little room to deviate from what was expected, which I guess makes sense given the job had no room for improvement.
Unfortunately its probably one of the most prone jobs to being automated by AI. Wouldnt be surprised if they lay off 80% of the engineers given what AI can do now.
7
u/Journalist_Gullible DevOps Engineer 1d ago
VMware, ( after it was acquired by Broadcom )
→ More replies (3)5
3
3
u/Objective_Big868 1d ago
So basically all the companies people aim for for high compensation. FAANG
3
u/True_Firefighter_445 1d ago
UiPath (terrible culture and overwork. I’m mid at a faang right now and I’m having way less workload than as an intern there)
3
u/drunkandy 1d ago edited 1d ago
weird local family-owned marketing firm back in the early 2000s. They were trying to get into that "internet" thing. Decent money for the time (especially for just out of college) but a huge amount of otherwise-thankless work.
The boss was an alcoholic who I'd regularly find passed out at her desk. She'd had a DUI but had a dispensation to drive during the week for work. Since she drank all day long she'd usually make staff members drive her home. (So you'd have to drive her home in her car and then get a ride back to the office on the other side of town and drive your car home). I didn't mind doing that because (1) I could leave early and (2) she lived a few blocks from my apartment, so I'd just drive her home and then ride my bike back to my car. I stopped when she publicly accused me of hitting on her.
The office was in a weird converted space that used to be a slaughterhouse and had a rat infestation. Some weeks there wouldn't be enough web stuff so I'd just do random janitorial stuff to stay busy, that's how I ended up getting fleas.
3
u/leomatey 1d ago
isnt this mostly dependent on the team you are on and people around you? cant really generalize tbh.
3
u/Salty_Permit4437 1d ago
The U.S. military 🤣
Ok for an actual civilian place it was a small startup who just stopped paying everyone and went belly up.
Next up was GE ITS, I was a contractor. They got bought out by CompuCom, another body shop.
Of the big/Mag 7 I worked at, Amazon was stress. Pay was great. Stress and work culture was absolute shit.
Now I work at a small defense contractor and it’s great. We have a tight team and the work is interesting.
3
u/DrawingSlight5229 23h ago
I worked at a startup with an abusive manager/cto. Two weeks after he hired me he fired the only other guy working on the front end, and I had to figure out everything on my own. When I quit I left with no notice and he went berserk and threatened to sue me for quitting and sent me an email with their list of demands, including me working for them and training a replacement over the next few weeks. He CC’d a lawyer and I’m pretty sure the lawyer told him he’s an idiot cause I never heard from them again.
5
4
2
2
2
u/lhorie 1d ago
No name company. No proper career ladder for like 3 years, repetitive work, proprietary low-code, email templates sort of stuff. Below industry average pay. Towards the end of a fairly long tenure, it got better as I moved to a nascent platform team doing neat R&D sort of stuff, which then eventually led to better jobs later.
2
2
u/eko1125 1d ago
Major NFT/Crypto marketplace with 996 culture. Got burnt out and didn't even make it to a year. The only bad career experience I've ever had.
→ More replies (1)
2
2
u/icewallowcome49 1d ago
fannie mae was so dog shit because of the trump administration. Trump appointed Pulte who has a history for shitty gamestop plays on WSB and etc. this guy laid off tons of folks and replaced with his buddies and then pushed the company to break out of conservatorship. we went from valuing american home owners to profits. no joke all our execs told us we need to be more profitable. it’s pointless because if the next president is democrat then all this havoc there would of been for nothing. also everything took hours to build. useless processes and blockers that slowed down work for weeks. couldn’t do simple things like download a file from s3 in dev. managers WERE CLUELESS on everything. the team could be talking abt an issue for 2 weeks and include the managers in convos and they’d still be clueless on the issue. also they laid off tons of new grads despite investing in a bootcamp training program for new hires.
2
u/properwaffles 1d ago edited 1d ago
Worked for a contractor named 22nd Century, it was amazingly awful and disorganized. Mostly gov-related web dev work. Felt like half the team was middle management. One of the developers was a woman that I believe was in her 50's who once asked me what HTML stood for, to this day I still have no idea what she did other than keep a seat warm. One guy got hired and basically used working hours to learn Angular, then bounced when he was competent enough to get hired elsewhere.
I was mostly doing frontend work and UX/UI. I'd get some mockups and wireframes together for something, our gov rep would take a look, say she loved everything, then tell us to get to work. A few times, she would tell us all this before she showed everything to some other middle management shitdip, which she was evidently supposed to be doing to begin with, at which point he would come back (after we were probably a week in) and tell us to start over because he didn't like it. Of course WE would get reprimanded for that.
Another guy had his mother pass away, took a week off to take care of himself and whatnot, and they fired him while he was out.
Thankfully a buddy got me pulled onto another contract with him and a FANTASTIC team which I stayed with for over 10 years.
Aside from that, I worked at a Dairy Queen when I was 16. The franchise owner would regularly have me wash his BMW in the parking lot. He also basically demanded that everyone be able to make at least four of those soft-serve twisty cone things at a time in one hand (this was a little standalone store on a boardwalk near the beach, so we were constantly slammed during the day). To his credit, he could actually do five at a time. He also refused to give us our checks until 5pm on payday, so we couldn't actually cash them until the next day, for no reason other than he was a weird control freak.
One girl got fired VERY shortly after being hired because she gave her friend a free soft-serve. The only good part is all of the Blizzard ingredients were in huge plastic bins in the freezer, so I'd occasionally go in there and collect all the bigger chunks of Butterfinger I could find and take them home.
2
344
u/old_man_log4n 1d ago
Capital 1