CVS Health

The benefits are good. You get the whole healthcare spread (vision, dental, medical).

There are tons of other insurances they offer as well.

The pay is high, since it's an east coast company, too.

Oh, and you are basically guaranteed that this company will always exist, so job security.

This place is suffering from perpetual insanity. It's a Kafkaesque fever dream. Where do you even begin...

First and foremost, this place touts being agile, but like every other place I've worked, they are anything but agile. It is ‘saFe’, so work is organized in PI’s (3-month iterations), which locks us into deadlines that we usually cannot meet, because, well, no one can predict what will happen a week from now, let alone 3 months. But the people at this company treat your estimates like the word of God.

Mid-PI, they will regularly change your expectations anyways, making you pivot into features that weren’t planned for, and then will arbitrarily scrutinize your pre-existing work in the process because they want to squeeze in time that doesn’t exist. In almost every new feature I’ve touched, the product side insists on pushing forward projects that aren't even possible to start because someone ‘higher up’ wants it.

We are often forced to work on outdated or non-existent UI mocks, only to have them change our UI expectations mid-sprint. Or the API's aren’t ready, or some other dependency we have on another team or service isn't actually set up. Or my most recent favorite is our accessibility team will tell us to do the opposite of what they told us to do prior once the code is implemented.

All of these aren’t necessarily bad, or deal breakers. I'm always willing to accept the need for flexibility and all that, but this all becomes our own fault as a team for either writing the wrong code, not understanding accessibility, or not owning the backend services (which is impossible because I'm a front-end dev).

The backend is entirely incompetent. In almost every instance of setting up API services, I’ve had to 'debug' an issue with the respective API team because the documentation is literally always wrong, or after we start consuming it, they decide to flat-out change it without communicating it. The crazy thing is that these tasks are marked as complete for them, but when we actually use them, they almost never work. It’s as if they aren’t really testing their code works before marking it as finished.

Not to mention, I think every other week the services go down anyways. This isn’t that bad on the face, but did I mention that engineering leadership consistently blames the front-end devs for the backend inconsistencies? We are supposed to be telling them how the backend services should work! Fascinating, and highly logical.

Also, it takes days for these issues to resolve, which then eats into our productivity, which then makes us look bad for not being able to integrate backend services quickly. Oh, good segue-way into the big reason why this place sucks...

The engineering leadership is full of people who haven't worked as developers for 15-20 years. Or even worse, some people in the engineering leadership chain have literally no years of experience as developers. Sometimes I play a game in engineering meetings where I will look at people's LinkedIn accounts to see why what they are saying sounds so illogical, and trust me, it puts it into perspective.

They will regularly critique our workflow from an arbitrary and abstract perspective without ever engaging us on what is reasonable, logical, or most efficient. It's some of the most enraging and arrogant stuff I've ever experienced as a developer to be told what to do, and how to do it, without ever having a discussion about it from my informed perspective.

As a consequence, we are often told to implement drastic changes to our day-to-day workflow for no other reason than to make leadership feel like they have something to do. It’s tyrannical frankly, but in some of the most asinine ways.

With the backend inconsistencies, it’s constantly pushed for us to develop on services that are inconsistent, broken, or unfinished, and then we are somehow at fault for not ‘taking ownership of the backend’ enough. We are regularly forced to read customer complaints and compile logs of them even though there is a department already designed for that exact purpose. We are blamed for accessibility inconsistencies when the actual ADA team is telling us to do things differently depending on who you speak to, and we are told to work on features that don’t have UI mocks just ‘because you should be able to get it done’.

Engineering leadership also does not know what the word ‘tech debt’ means. They regularly misuse it, and when they ask us to report tech debt, they routinely tell us that we are wrong, and that it isn't tech debt. They seem to be under the impression that tech debt is synonymous with bugs that users experience, and have no real comprehension on what the implications of the word actually is, which is most definitely not anything to do with a user in any capacity.

Ultimately, it’s a conversation that leads you to write a review like this because you can’t fathom how people are in this level of power with such little understanding of their actual field. To put it succinctly, it feels like I’m in an intellectual fun house when I speak to people above me, and it will for you too.

The code bases are unkempt, and there is no oversight to it at all. It's a free-for-all. A wild west situation if you will.

My manager (still not sure what he actually does other than gets yelled at by his bosses?) can't code, and never looks in the code base, so it's up to us to police ourselves, or just accept the fate of complete anarchy. There is no documentation. There are no tests. And no one has any idea who is in charge of anything, ever.

Trying to get an answer to anything is an entire day wasted. It is a bureaucracy at its finest. Everyone is trying to save their own hide, and no one has any interest in making this place function better at all. I abhor this place with a seething passion, but hey, it pays well if you know how to negotiate salary.

Also, there is no flexibility in your hours. You are a 9-to-5 through and through. And they have this arbitrary expectation for people to go back to the office. So they will probably only hire you if you agree to move to the middle of nowhere.

Listen more, talk less. You don't know as much as you think you do.