There is no career path for a new hire - I received 2 months Jump Start in Java, then got staffed to a Python project, which was switched to Angular Front-End development after 4 months and .NET Back-End after further 3. All within the same project. I felt like a parcel and no one gave me extra time to gain experience required for developing in Angular and .NET which were new technologies to me.
Staffing employees to projects is random in general and doesn't take skills into consideration. We have multiple understaffed or dissatisfied colleagues that cannot change the project actively. Developers with 8, 10 years of experience are reporting to a product owner with 3 years of experience.
A developer on a project is treated as a cost - he/she has to be as cheap as possible so the business analyst/product owner can sell his code with the highest margin possible and secure his promotion. Business gets promoted twice as fast as development, despite less workload.
My project imposed office change from Jena to Hamburg on me because "I was getting too expensive". This was also used as an argument in the performance feedback discussion. On the other hand, the salaries are significantly below market average and the management is admitting it publicly during community meetings. My gross salary rose 13% percent after the location change whereas costs more than 40%. There was a loudly announced salary increase this month which gave me further 1,8%.
Plenty of time is spent doing HR work - filling time reports, timesheets for the managers, booking travel, reporting costs. Several hours are spent on required ethics and security trainings. None of those is counted when it comes to performance assessment.
The servilism towards the customer is extreme. Specification meetings consume often more time than the actual development. While developing a web service we had to argue for commonly used modern solutions like Service Fabric or Rabbit MQ.
In theory, the culture is tolerant and neutral but actual project reality clearly shows foreigners and women are discriminated. My female colleague who reported arrogant and offensive behavior of her co-worked was criticised by the management as "overreacting and having personal problems with him".
Equipment is suitable for simple office work and not regular development - mini 13,3-inch laptops, mini 4-inch iPhone. I received an over 10-years-old 17inch monitor after 4 months in the project and the first proper 23-inch monitor after 15 months. Even external keyboard and mouse took several months to order.
Last but not least, promotion process is long (almost 6 months from first discussions to promotion), rare (one chance per year only, second round is for cases who fulfilled the criteria previously but project was lacking the budget) criteria are not transparent. Sympathy of the boss, good contact with the customer and the right nationality are more important than performance. B2 level German clause in the contract is required for some and for others seems to be omitted. A lot depends on the career counselor, if you're out of luck and you're his 7th counselee, he is based on the other side of Germany or he just isn't engaged, you can forget about promotion. There is a high chance the project manager - crucial for the decision about the promotion - has no clue whatsoever about your performance nor scope of duties. You are just overwhelmed with dependency - decisions about your future are done by managers, counselors, product leads, product owners, customers and you feels just like a cog in this big outsourcing machine.
