CVS Health

There's nothing good about CVS' IT department or its management. It's a hellscape of mismanagement and incompetence.

IT management is some of the worst I've ever encountered. "Management" has devolved into fiefdoms where groups actively work against each other. No accountability when managers fail; they get promoted instead.

Their platform is mid-90's technology that revolves around batch processing. Any attempt to modernize the infrastructure has resulted in complete failure and banishment of those involved.

Pair-programming is not used to increase productivity or spark innovation; rather, it's used so workers rat each other because management is so incompetent. Basically, it takes two engineers to accomplish the work of one engineer because CVS doesn't trust anybody that works for them.

Project management is an utter disaster. It's impossible to know the state of a project at any given time due to the arcane and obtuse tracking system.

It's hugely wasteful. I estimate CVS wastes at least $500M / year in its IT department due to legacy systems, bloated managerial staff, and accounting provisions to cover processing errors.

"Lipstick on a pig" - I personally hated the once or twice a month department meetings where management tried to tell us how wonderful everything is when, in fact, it was a sh*t show.

CVS is where dreams go to die.

Burn it to the ground. There's nothing worth saving.