Best Buy

Decent pay and good work-life balance. Mostly working from home is nice, especially when lots of companies are forcing RTO.

Bonuses can be nice, but it's based on the whole company performance, which IT has really no bearing on.

Leadership is comically inept – truly emperors with no clothes, coming up with insane, complex solutions to nonexistent problems just to play with tech.

Meanwhile, legacy systems that keep the company running are being held together with duct tape and parts from eBay. Nobody learns from the mistakes of the past; they just keep rebuilding the same garbage on new infra and saying all the new buzzwords to make it sound cool.

Lots of H1B contractors – too many, in my opinion. Technical skills are lacking, and communication skills are basically nonexistent.

Too much red tape & process: architecture, compliance, management, and a dozen other warm bodies need to sign off on your thing before you can write the first line of code.

Meetings, meetings, meetings. Also way too much documentation and tickets – we are way better at producing them than actual working software.

Product is a joke, but it's not really their fault, I don't think. Most of the requirements are just dictated by senior management, not coming from anyone or anything in the business. It's really quite sad. So we build stuff that no one will ever use and ship it into the void.

Reorgs are frequent and clearly used to reward the favorites without having to go through the inline promotion process, which almost never works and takes literally years. If you don't look like upper management, don't expect a promotion, like ever. And even if you get one, it will just be in title only – you won't get any more money.

Retire (at least Brian did).

This isn't Accenture.

Focus on building stuff that helps the company.

Check your egos.