GoDaddy

GoDaddy was an exciting place to work. The benefits (vacations, medical, etc.) were among the best of any company in the nation.

I got an MSDN account. The pay was very competitive.

The Christmas party was always spectacular. And in my team's case, the quarterly team bonding experience was pretty nice.

Most of the more general organizational facets of the company, such as the HR orientation process, IT getting software installed, and having a system of collaboration, were pretty solid.

Celebrating its successes, GoDaddy was full of surprises. One time, they even brought a marching band to stomp through the offices while we were working.

All the pros don't make up for how frustrating the experience was for me as a developer.

The company grew very, very fast a few years ago, so people who had no business being in senior management—some of whom were incredibly crass in demeanor and somehow that looked good to the top brass—ended up in senior management. People who were already in senior management likewise had their egos stroked seeing the company explode in success those years ago. Technical executives had very little technical understanding of the technical decisions they regularly made. There seemed to be little appreciation among the leadership for practicing humility. One week I sat in a room adjacent to a very senior technical executive, and he would be yelling cuss words at the top of his lungs all day long, apparently in "conversations" with people on the phone.

We had desktop computers, no laptops, as we were adamantly discouraged from taking our work home (although we could remote in from our personal computers at home at night).

The internal enforcement of security was an absolute nightmare, probably the worst part of the experience of working there. I couldn't even so much as check for current drivers for my computer on Dell's website without the head of security e-mailing me asking what the heck I was doing on Dell's FTP server. Social networks like Facebook were banned; any attempts to access them caused an alert to a senior manager. Visiting the call center with an iPad or other laptop/tablet device in hand would get me stopped at the door, as some security jerk would start yelling at me red-faced for attempting to enter the call center with such a device in hand, even though I was entering to meet with individuals who were going to be working with me to develop software for said device.

All outgoing e-mails, even to HR, were closely monitored by my own boss.

The amount of red tape and waiting involved in setting up servers, and the impossibility of arranging for a debugging environment that more than slightly approximates just one of the production servers, made it impossible to produce a stable product. I had to beg for many months, well over a year, to upgrade my workstation computer from Windows XP, even as we were developing locally but deploying the product to Windows Server 2008 (at the time).

Bugs we had triaged were piling up, but every time a new set of bugs was found by customer service, those bugs ended up taking priority. Older bugs rarely got fixed, and architectural design flaws that created so many bugs to begin with couldn't be readily addressed. Refactoring was completely disallowed; the biases of QA managed the development decisions and not the other way around.

Egos, both among senior management and among developers who had seniority, were overwhelming. One group of developers had a hissy fit that our team was not using their several-years-old, home-grown, undocumented data architecture, built for another time and even under an old abandoned company name.

The usual rules of brown-nosing and very long-term seniority were the only means to see the hope of climbing a ladder. Most people who were actually "senior" were employees before the company's big boom, and that was it. No more promotions were to be had. Promotion was not measured on whether you knew your stuff and/or could lead well, but rather whether you were there in those early days and/or you kissed up well. Most leadership role opportunities were made by someone being promoted or fired and were usually filled by in-house candidates on the basis of being "yes men".

Separate your call centers from the other workforces. Separate them both physically and in how they are treated.

Call centers might hire near-minimum-wage workers, but developers who are already approaching or have reached six-digit salaries do not need to be treated like criminals; seriously, lighten up on the security and "Big Brother" behavior.

Let those who are hired to be technically minded make the technical decisions and stop getting in their way; better yet, learn more, a lot more, about the technology they are paid to utilize and implement so that whatever decisions you do make don't make you look like a total jackass.

QA's job is to validate the work of the developer, not to make development decisions; don't let QA block developers from refactoring code; rather, work with the team to ensure that clean-ups and code improvements are palatable, and encourage developers to apply basic refactoring conventions in the areas of code they are tasked to work in.

Give employees a private channel of communication to HR, free from bosses' perusal, such as a web page with a textarea input that is a truly secured message.

HR: In addition to providing a truly respectable secure channel of employee communication regarding their bosses, give complaining employees more advice for interpersonal and professional success, rather than proxying the complaint to the boss or responding with publishing more rules and regulations. Also, the last buck in hiring stops with you; stop allowing unqualified personnel to climb the ladder and sit in roles they have no business sitting in.