• she/they

38, irish-american
גִיוֹרֶת

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I've become deeply frustrated with my employer and a number of policies which have made conditions difficult. Possibly our biggest problem is that we've been badly understaffed for 3 years, which has never improved. My entire section is only 40% staffed, my team is managing 4 or 5 projects (or products, if you prefer) simultaneously. In fact, our section is supposed to have an entire fourth team but doesn't. What's worse is that HR won't permit us to hire engineers on a full-time-remote basis. What we do instead is cycle though semi-competent to incompetent contractors who only last a month or two at best. We've been doing this for three fucking years.

We've done a lot of work on projects that ultimately have gone nowhere, in large part because management isn't interested in the expertise or judgment of engineering teams, and keeps pitching big-brain enterprise wide project concepts, hiring contractors or assigning interns to the work, but never fully delivering it. Wash and repeat.

We've gone through at least 3 iterations of an "enterprise search" tool to provide a single point of access to multiple data repositories. It isn't that hard. I was assigned to the team that built the first one. But we weren't allowed the time to deliver something fully working, and it was handed off to another team that doesn't have time to improve it. They have been maintaining a barely functional proof of concept application for two years, which almost nobody actually uses. This summer, they got interns to build another proof of concept to basically do the same thing, but without actually being hooked into real datasources. There's no follow-through. Unless they paid a million dollars to a vendor to develop a barely working application that we then spend 3 years trying to maintain because it was so broken upon delivery that it's literally slower to use than the old manual process, and costs substantially more to run.

I'm gonna update my resume and start looking for another job. But before that, I'm writing up a letter detailing some of these concerns (specifically the contractor/FTE thing) because I know another guy in my section is interviewing for new jobs, and I'm thinking about leaving too. If this company gives literally any shits, they are gonna have to address these problems.


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