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Good company, but I hit a bad team

Senior Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Autodesk for 1 year
November 11, 2019
Portland, Oregon
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Location, benefits, workspace, equipment, work-life balance

Cons

Project scope, language, and framework were changed right after I started.

Old and crufty codebase with poor documentation, inconsistent code style rules (mix of semicolons and non-semicolons in a JS project), and inconsistent file structure.

Manager once told me to get back to work after I spent 8 minutes in Slack chat discussing the pros and cons of a few terms related to testing. I got told that I should be coding, but had also been told that I needed to be more collaborative 5 minutes earlier in the same conversation. Typical "read my mind" sort of criticism from that manager.

Manager seemed surprised that I posted a Confluence doc about the vertical whitespace rules that I and 2 team members agreed on. The project was many years old, and no one had written down style rules. Manager said, "I thought all languages wanted zero whitespace." I had no response to this; I was just flabbergasted. This is one of the most WTF statements I've ever heard from a manager. I told a colleague about it (someone with close to 20 years of experience), and his response was one word: "Run." For an example of vertical whitespace in a modern JS project, see packages/react/src/React.js in the React GitHub repo (not allowed to link it here).

Team member told me, "Your question was inappropriate" after I told them that the condescending response I got to a question was inappropriate. When someone tells you you are being inappropriate, you don't say "no, u"; that's rude. This team has issues.

Advice to Management

Believe people who tell you something is wrong.

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