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Dysfunctional. Ready to leave 2 weeks after starting

Software Development Engineer II
Current Employee
Has worked at Expedia Group for 1 year
September 23, 2016
Bellevue, Washington
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Relatively up-to-date technologies used.

Free sodas.

Bellevue office has a nice view.

Comfortable chairs.

Microwaves in the break room.

Cons

Tribal atmosphere. No training on the system. No documentation on the system. Must work with no requirements at all.

You will feel like an outsider and won't feel super welcome, especially if you are a contractor. The tribal atmosphere will treat you like some sort of interloper or invader. People aren't mean or anything, just not welcoming. Meanwhile, you are supposed to know which tribe to battle with to get stuff done. Knowing that before your start date is a must (good luck with that!).

I was given no training at all, and the person that I was supposed to shadow was out of the country for a month. Other "team mates" were also gone for weeks at a time. There were a number of days where I was the only one of my team actually in the office, not very good for getting trained.

So, I tried looking at documentation, only to find, well, nothing. There were a few things here and there, but nothing very useful and mostly out of date. But of course, it was my fault that I didn't have a complete understanding of the system after the first month. Well, duh, the guy supposed to be "training" me left the country for a month three days after I started.

Also, there are some serious SDLC issues. This is a shop that believes agile means having absolutely no requirements or documentation. Any documentation done is a total afterthought. There are no comments in code, and code is totally not self-documenting. In my codebase, often classes have the same name, only differing in case.

Requirements are in the form of an incomplete sentence, literally of the form "Make X do Y." That's it. You talk to three different team members and get three different interpretations. Refactoring multiple times until everyone on the team is happy, only to get smacked down from a different tribe. Refactoring again... It would've been nice if someone told me about the other tribe so I could talk to them directly, but that's not the way it's done here.

The work itself isn't difficult; there's just too much dysfunction for me to have any desire to stay.

Update: Yesterday, there was a yelling match between one group and another...so, yeah.

Advice to Management

Reduce the siloed, tribal culture.

Improve processes / learn the difference between agile and anarchy.

Actually train new employees/contractors.

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