Worst experience out of 20+ years as a software engineer
Pros
- Learning what kind of company you don't want to be in as a software development engineer - When you're having a non-work related conversation (water-cooler chats) - Office space if you want to go back into the office - The team I'm on is nice, we have a flat employee structure so no one feels higher than the other
Cons
- Mediocre amount of inefficient meetings that deducts development time (bad if you're loaded with tasks and are unable to complete your sprint) - Lots of unnecessary security precaution that can easily be mitigated using common sense, just adds friction to the development experience in an already time constraint work environment. - No room for innovation in terms of bringing new paradigms, programming patterns and technologies without going through extreme feedback. Then finding out later a Lead or Principal engineer making a sub-par version of a solution was slipped in due to positional status in the company. - Feels like a bad retail or fast-food chain job waiting to clock out at the end of the day - Do not disclose anything to Leads, Managers or anyone of status because it may be used against you. No one is on your side. Make judgement calls on the peers you want to connect with and always have your guard up. - Company acts like they're medium-large scale companies in terms of process but fails to even deliver and instead acts like a dysfunctional start-up company, so you get a mix of hardcore processes that leads don't follow (cause they're the ones that invoked it) and startup where processes are thrown out the window at the pleasure of upper level developers and management which causes Intern, Software Engineers, and Seniors left wondering what to do, then fall into a "I don't care anymore" state. - Unnecessary levels of complexity to do a simple task, layered with bloat code, often find myself reducing 1000 line level code to 100 which ends up being more efficient, performant and fixes legacy bugs that is often times ignored. - Saying "work life balance" at Koho is a meme for "work work balance", if you don't complete your tasks, you often feel compelled to work extra after hours or on weekends. Good luck when its time for your personal assessment and you figure out you can't get promoted or you're on the "watch list" for being fired. This coincides with career opportunities cause you'll also never rise.
