The worst job I've ever had - Product Owner Equifax Employee Review

Repeated waves of remarkably bad decisions have left the biggest sources of revenue struggling to feed the beast. Agile is paid nothing but lip service. Some small, cosmetic changes were made to qualify for certain distinctions years ago but those changes were never embraced by the company and have fallen away. Teams are still made up of separate sets of developers and testers; developers unwilling to help with testing toward the end of the sprint and testers not given the support needed to contribute to development. Iterative design is impossible given that the business side of the house never even paid lip service to becoming agile. In some organizations, most of the development staff are located offshore, but instead of establishing teams offshore and allocating specific blocks of work to those teams, many teams are spread between onshore and offshore making any pretension of co-location a joke. Sales and marketing defines the requirements and due dates, just like in waterfall. Teams are to realize software to those requirements and within that time frame, limited to predetermined available resources. Priorities are regularly abandoned and changed midway through, with developers swapped back and forth between different priorities as if context-switching has no cost. Even when priorities are kept constant for a time, developers need to squeeze their development work in between the time they spend on production support tasks. Some releases get badly bogged down in a seemingly never-ending back-and-forth, trying to get through numerous new process gates. Cooperation is generally viewed as something other departments need to do; when the needs of the business extend across organization boundaries, good luck getting anything done in a reasonable amount of time/with a reasonable amount of effort, especially when the cooperation you need to serve your customers requires cooperation from shared services groups. Even though offshore staff work late into their evening, it still results in a remarkably short period of time when working as a full team is possible, made even worse by the fact that many of the onshore team members are spread across two or three teams. The lack of cooperation extends even within teams, with enough onshore staff unwilling to time shift to help increase the number of hours that the team could be working together. Politics, rather than managerial talent, governs management. Managers are driven to satisfy objectives rather than customers. Managers are quite blatant about their willingness to use funding intended for one purpose to further the pet projects that will serve as foundation for their next promotion. New leaders make bold promises which they don't have any way to keep, since the organization is far bigger than its leaders and reality won't cooperate with their vision. Politics has taken a toll in other ways, especially since the introduction of a matrix management structure. During the latest round of layoffs, critical staff members for certain projects were let go because their work was not critical to their direct-line management's own projects. There is no penalty for disrespecting staff. Where this manifests, it breeds a general environment of casual disrespect, including between disciplines, and despoils any chance of pulling together as a team to serve customers. Benefits are terrible. Equifax would charge more for inferior health insurance for just me than my partner is paying for superior health insurance for the both of us.