Life drain, dead-end - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso Crossover for Work

Crossover has a huge employee churn rate compared to the average in the industry, and no wonder - people are milked to exhaustion and then replaced as they burn out. Modelled after the factories of the early 1900s, it takes Taylorism and scientific management to an extreme in the software world. You don't belong to a team, but to an "Assembly Line", where you do one kind of work (write tests, for example) over and over and over again. Tasks come as if on a conveyor belt, you pick one (actually you don't pick - it's assigned to you by an algorithm and that's that) , work on it and submit it, then get a grade ("quality check"). For each task, you have an SLA to meet, and SLAs are in the hour-range. (4hours, 8hours, 1 hour!) And mind you - SLAs are real-time hours. Need to go to lunch? Have a doctor's appointment? Need to go to the toilet? Too bad, the SLA clock can't be stopped, and when time is out, your work is submitted and graded no matter how (in)complete it might be. Due to the fact that everyone is graded individually and they're obsessed with grade metrics, there's no teamwork as such - one and only one person works on a particular task, and collaboration is frowned upon. In fact, there's no concept of "team" other than merely "people in the same assembly line as you", if that can be called a team. As an individual, you and your personal history or circumstances don't matter. Only your metrics do. And not all metrics - only the last months. And metrics and goalposts keep changing all the time, all the way up to targets impossible to achieve. Despite the fact that they constantly claim that metrics don't really matter, they do, a lot, and it doesn't matter if you have been years performing excellently or providing a lot of value that's not reflected in the metrics - a couple of bad months and you're fired. Everyone must work individually. Most of the work is done by executing specific playbooks. The design makes sure that everyone can be replaced on the spot. There's no "career path" as such. There are no promotions whatsoever, and no on-the-job training. There're no salary reviews - the salary you sign on with is the salary you're stuck with, forever, year after year. Of course they'll claim they promote people, and they do have a couple of lone examples that they showcase, but just ask out of the many thousand employees, how many were promoted in the last year, and compare that with the industry average. Not to mention that the promotion mechanism changes every other day, and you never actually qualify. (Hint: The industry average promotion rate is 8.9% per year. Out of 100 employees, 9 are promoted every year) You can't even sign up to other - higher - jobs within the same company. Even if you pass all the tests with stellar results, you'll be dsiqualified anyway because jumping up would be a promotion. In fact, if you compare the requirements for being promoted to a position vs the requirements for getting the same position by applying externally, you'll notice that there are many more requirements in the case of internal promotions. That's right : even if you have been with the company for years, you need to do everything that an external applicant would do (all the same tests, exercises, interviews, etc.), and then some more additionally that external applicants don't do, just because you're trying to get out of your original box. This alone speaks volumes about how valued you are within the company. All your work is closely monitored by their WorkSmart tool, which takes screenshots, webcamshots and can even record videos of what you're doing, which are then scrutinized to see how you could have performed some particular task 20 ms faster. Everything you do is logged at minute intervals - even the number of keys you strike per minute and the number of mouse clicks., and if these don't reach high enough levels ("intensity" as they call it), you're under suspicion. Periodically you must do a CCAT (Cognitive Aptitude) test, and people that don't make the cut are fired. It doesn't matter if they're fantastic developers, it doesn't matter if they have been delivering brilliant results, it doesn't matter if they have great metrics, if you don't happen to know what words like "cantankerous" mean, bad luck - bad score, fired. (no, it's not a joke, and those kinds of words actually appear on the CCAT test) The structure is completely hierarchical. You're expected to do exactly what you're told, and any feedback is usually discarded and frowned upon. You're expected to follow the coded process to the letter, or your metrics will suffer. Most of the decisions come from upper management. And since upper management is constantly tweaking the factory to hyperoptimize production, your whole "team" may be disbanded from one day to the next, even though the company is doing great financially, and even if everyone in that particular team was performing excellently. The funniest part is that, for all the claims about this being about creating a factory that is superoptimized, the end result is so inefficient, so full of red-tape and process dead weight that it takes ages to produce even a minimal feature for a product, not to speak about delivering a product from scratch. Which is the obvious expected outcome in an environment where everyone is focused on some random fine-grained metrics (which in many cases don't even make sense), and on following a process, rather than on delivering something of actual value. The end result is that everything becomes metric and process-focused, rather than product and actual value focused. Not to mention the rampant metrics fraud and artifically fabricated tasks to meet metrics. I witnessed time and time again how a simple functionality in a product that any decent cross-functional team elsewhere would have taken (at most) 2 weeks to implement took literally months, and then it was implemented incorrectly anyway, despite every single step following the written process and getting stellar "quality grades". Of course, Management realizes how botched some of the things they designed are, and that's why processes and metrics are tweaked constantly (sometimes even weekly) and replaced with new ones that sometimes make even less sense, a constant running forward towards nowhere. When I joined, almost 5 years ago, the salaries were good, but since then the market has caught up and you can find way better salaries in places with much less stress and a much more humane work environment. Why did I stay for so long? Well, because you get promised again and again that "there will be a way to be promoted", because I thought I couldn't get those salaries for remote work anywhere else, and because you're blinded by the theoretical flexibility of working anywhere any way you want. Boy, was I wrong about all of that. Within one week of leaving I was working remotely in a different company, without all that on-your-neck supervision and earning more.