American Express

My boss and coworkers are lovely.

Ever since Ravi was hired, things have been going downhill for tech.

Projects are underfunded. We're asked to split our teams across the US and India 50/50, which makes no sense for some teams and makes the work-life balance a living hell for most. How are you going to have overlap with teams which are 12 hours apart and not work people into misery?

They treat people like numbers. Not able to meet a deadline? Add more new hires who will need upskilling and will drag the team down to add more capacity!

Oh, you're now an overly complex team with too many people and overhead? You're just not doing your job.

They're also displacing leadership and adding to the chaos before resolving the previous chaos they created.

Value co-creation is a ridiculous thing to preach if you're going to make things harder to coordinate and harder to co-create.

Tech engineers are human too. Asking us to work in the office three days a week while splitting our time to connect with our 12-hour time difference counterparts, plus managing releases at absurd 8 PM to 3 AM times, or the occasional Saturday, while not giving us any flexibility to not show up fewer days a week, is insane.

Blue box values sure don't mean very much when you can make up arbitrary metrics and goals and force us into it.

Also, the restriction on internal moves means no career opportunities. Many of my peers gave up and refuse to go above and beyond any more. I do not blame them.

If that happens when I'm ready for the next role, I'd just leave once I had enough saved up too.