Floundering Company Has Terrible Practices and Policies
Pros
There are good people there trying their best to make the most out of crumby company policies and C-level management.
Cons
No onboarding or training, no product training or team orientation. Ping pong, while not bad, is all the "culture" that this company had. The CTO loves all things curry so you better as well. Very low benefits comparatively. External third-party HR doesn't care about the employee, only about saving the company money. No health insurance for 90 days. No sick leave or time off of any sort for 90 days. No 401k contributions of any sort for 90 days. Employees frequently come in to work sick. Inconsistent application of temporary WFH (including accommodations for sick employees) and early out policies across managers and departments. Justification required for requesting an ethernet adapter, reasonable monitors, and non-broken chairs. You'll feel like you just asked your strict father if you could go play at a friend's house. Team lead, managers, and a few others frequently ran and attended standup meetings while driving in the car. Story points are literal hours, i.e. 1 story point = 1 hour. Only the team lead, manager, and product owner participate in story creation and refinement. Team members must accept the story points the team leader chose for the story. (They did start requiring team members to individually and independently confirm the story points on each story they were pre-assigned a couple days before the sprint, but because team members had not participated in the creation or refinement of those stories, it took longer than they wanted to check each story) Stories are frequently not ready for the sprint, often needing on-the-fly refinement during the sprint to be able to do the work. (Yes, the product team got upset when you said anything about a story not being ready for the sprint.) Inexplicable code complexity and vast tech-debt.
