Dell

Salary was good: $185K/year.

Project idea was fun: Create a Containers as a Service platform for internal use.

Health insurance under the contractor company is atrocious. There are no other benefits.

The environment was toxic from the very beginning, and even after providing feedback, it never improved.

Managers and leaders were hardly doing their jobs. (Read up on "Quiet Firing")

The manager was the typical meme boss that sits on top of everybody and complains about why things don't get done.

Team Leads had no idea how to lead; they were not familiar with Agile processes. Leaders couldn't even properly define stories, their acceptance criteria, or even basic information required to get started. If you tried to schedule meetings to clarify the stories, the meetings were pushed back 3-4 days. You got to actually start working on things mid-sprint.

I even had a Team Lead have the audacity of telling me: "When I joined DELL, nobody ever told me anything. I had to dive into the code and figure things out myself. You have to do the same." Clearly showing the toxicity of the environment and the lack of willingness to improve it or even do their jobs as leads.

Before I joined, they had a contractor ghost overtime (work without charging the hours). The person got the task done, and they are still using it, but the leads and manager blamed him for a bug and fired him.

Pro Tip: NEVER GHOST HOURS! It's illegal.

None of the code was ever commented. Readmes were never used in GitLab. Whenever I tried to put comments in my code, they purposefully removed them because "it made the code look clean." No sir, that's an anti-pattern and makes working and managing code unnecessarily harder. It also doesn't help newcomers to the project.

They wanted to extend my contract, but I had enough and left.

Be more engaged; actually manage and lead.

Provide support for new people, especially if they are contractors on short contracts. Part of managing and leading is having clear plans and roadmaps. Contractors don't have the time to "dive in and figure things out" on short contracts.

Train your managers and leads on Agile if you pretend to use Agile as a methodology.

Actually listen to feedback from people. It was clear that they never listened. Everything came in one ear and left the other without processing.

Follow best practices!