Walmart

The @Labs is open to using open-source and cutting-edge technologies.

Office facilities are good.

The upper management are technocrats who are unskilled in management and execution. As a direct consequence, the director-level management is busy doing turf wars and building empires. Forget promotion unless you are a director's crony or willing to be their lieutenant.

The lower-level managers are specifically hired to be spineless yes-men, and that's exactly who they are. In other words, if you want to join Walmart Labs, be a Director or a Director's friend.

There are very few A-list technical players. Most serious developers stay away from the company, and good for them. The interview process is very disorganized and mediocre. Mediocre people get hired. There are people (friends of directors, of course) who do nothing but quote poetry and not get fired. In general, expectations are very low. But don't expect to be promoted, even if you beat expectations 100-fold. For that, you need to be a director's friend.

Scrum is sort of practiced but is a joke. Product Owners are very weak and report to the same manager, or even are the managers. Needless to say, this is a huge non-starter for real Scrum.

Due to the inability of upper management to execute, coordination between teams is non-existent. In fact, cross-team interactions are solely politics-driven.

Unrealistic expectations are given to teams to code, test (QA hardly exists), and support applications full-time. If you want to deploy complex infrastructure, it is pretty much your responsibility. Don't expect anybody from management to think about support capacity, or to think about anything at all.

There is no perceptible culture and no fun. Yes, if you are lucky, you can get a chance to work on a challenging project; however, don't expect it to be used due to mis-execution at upper levels.

So, if your idea of a job is fighting fires and being left without proper compensation, this is it.

Hire real managers who not only have a vision but can execute it. Hire good managers and get rid of the little empire builders.

Fix the head and the rest will follow.