Warner Bros. Discovery

Turner offers a very good benefits/salary package for some of its employees. The company was good about offering generous vacation time.

Turner (affectionately known by me and former alums as "Turnover") is a toxic work environment.

I left EA back in 2008 after deciding that the company does nothing more than make people miserable. Since leaving, I've re-entered my profession psychologically and enjoy programming again. I've worked at several good companies since my departure, but as a senior software developer, I've also worked with quite a few former Turnover employees, and all of us share the same basic story.

Turnover encourages bullying, degradation, and belittlement of highly competent and energetic engineers on the part of incompetent team leads and even more incompetent middle managers. I've held off writing a review of the company, thinking that perhaps I would judge too harshly, but my current employer recently hired a former Turnover employee who, as it happens, took my place on a team there. I'm glad to have this new professional on my team, but much of what he related about his experience there mirrors mine perfectly. I write this review as a warning to other software developers who really love their craft and want to excel professionally and personally. In the time I was there and since, I can count about 30 people who quit. The company is simply not able to retain people in the EA department because of the toxic conditions promoted by the company as a whole.

The Enterprise Applications department is rife with the loss of good talent, especially in recent months, as the job market has improved. (My current client has picked up two Turnover alumni, making half our software development team now former members of Turnover.) As a former employee, in my current position as a senior software developer, I've interviewed Turnover employees looking to leave the company, and their story is always the same: toxic workplace, incompetent and wasteful management, cliquishness, and a total disdain for anyone who tries to improve the business and software development processes of the organization. Younger software developers especially feel a great sense of frustration that their careers and skill sets are being destroyed working on projects where cost overruns, missed deadlines, and a steadfast opposition to good methodology are commonplace.

Much of this is caused by the fact that the company simply makes too much money, so it wastes valuable resources on the hiring of incompetent middle managers who treat their teams very poorly, while at the same time promoting highly incompetent individuals on the basis of their gender/sexual orientation/skin color. In other cases, senior management simply shows blatant favoritism towards individuals who are pets, yes-men, and sycophants. Turnover's accolades in the public sphere are about "diversity" and the promotion of women and minorities. What's left out is that competent people are often passed over for lead and managerial positions because they do not fit Time-Warner's definition of diversity. Instead, incompetent and socially retarded individuals are selected on the basis of accidental qualities. This spans all the way to the senior vice president in charge of EA.

Turnover is the only organization I've been at where entire teams of people quit in disgust and frustration. I saw one colleague have a nervous breakdown; another had a similar experience and quit without giving a two-week notice. I saw two examples while there of entire teams leaving, sometimes without notice. Since then, I've heard from friends and former colleagues of other cases, including a recent incident where three business analysts left because a female minority was hired at a higher rate.

Some more concrete examples of what I experienced while there for 3 years:

• "Senior" developers were allowed to use bullying and coercion in their encounters with team members.
• The EA department had a special workshop on accountability training, but in practice, it meant business as usual, where bright, enthusiastic professionals were taken into offices and brow-beat and berated by the incompetent old guard.

Preferential treatment was shown to team members who

• did not show up to work on certain days,
• did not complete assigned coding tasks,
• regularly blamed others for their own shoddy workmanship.

It was especially demoralizing when certain employees were allowed to take as many vacation days as they wanted while the rest of us had to work on deadlines (in the rare cases where we actually had project work and weren't simply being cowed into bilking other Turnover divisions.)