Huge cultural red flags - Recensione dipendente - Software Engineer presso Shift5

My time at Shift5 was excessively painful. I was in Engineering and this review is specific to that part of the company. Using vulgar slurs for women in the workplace especially when you are talking to a woman is unprofessional. Addressing women with familiar, condescending terms like “honey” is unprofessional. I experienced both. When management can talk to me like that in front of my peers, it tells me 2 things. First, that management thinks this is acceptable behavior. Second, I am on my own. The other problem I saw was that management was not actually managing people. It is as if there was an assumption that people would self manage without any attempt to even verify self management was happening. I’m all about trusting people but it has to be trust and verify not just trust. It was extremely difficult to make progress. It's difficult to have substantive discussion about technical concerns when I had to walk on eggshells to avoid bruising fragile egos. Just trying to have a discussion on technical concerns resulted in a lot of resentment and what appeared to be a desire for revenge. Instead of discussions being about requirements, constraints and tradeoffs, I would hear all manner of logical fallacies including straw men arguments, appeals to ignorance, appeals to authority, hasty generalizations, red herrings and circular arguments, so many words, so little content. Another complication of trying to have discussion was that the definition of critical words would just change on the fly. Failure to manage created an environment where appearances and social connections seemed to be more important than actual deliverables. Talking and politicking seemed to have more influence than actual data. Lack of management at Shift5 looks identical to lack of management on the middle school playground. It creates the perfect environment for bullies. Failure to manage created unclear responsibilities and ownership. When I had responsibility for a deliverable, I had zero confidence that management would provide any support and yet I would still be held responsible. Blame shifting was a recurring theme, I could find myself holding the bag for the responsibilities of others. It was chaos. Speaking strictly as an engineer, my job isn’t to decide what product we build. My job was to partner with the product org to build what the product org wanted. When the organization failed to provide the vision, the engineers were held responsible. If a product or feature had multiple teams required to deliver it, you didn’t want to be the last team in that line. Failure to manage the required dependencies means that the team most dependent on other teams is going to have zero time and get the burden of all the responsibility. It’s completely dysfunctional.