Recently been working on a project as a vendor for one of the country's largest companies, and one of the "top" companies in our industry.
I have been appalled by how horrible their internal processes are. Their Product team seems to have absolutely no idea of their business goals and seems totally disconnected from their development teams. Their development teams seem wholly incompetent and lack the fundamental understanding of what is required for software integration.
These are just some basic examples based on my interactions, but it seems insane how a company like this has been able to succeed and grow with such incompetence. It's like we were paired with the "stupid" kids on a school project.
I previously worked at an extremely large company, and I was nothing but impressed by the intelligence of my peers and the standards of our internal processes. I wrongly assumed every large and successful company would be similar.
Does anyone have some horror stories to share?
Sarah:
Sure have!
I remember being so impressed when I finished grad school and started working at NORTHROP GRUMMAN. They flew a bunch of us new grads out, gave us a tour, wine/dine/etc. it sure looked impressive. In hindsight, my first red flag was when someone pointed out a computer in their lab was still running Windows XP (this was the mid-2010s).
Over the next 4 years, I saw gross incompetence everywhere. Nepotism in hiring/promotions was rampant. The diversity that the company pushed so hard manifested itself in a weird way where various ethnicities were basically confined to sections of the main corporate building. For example, the corner section I worked in was predominately Jewish and all of them came from the same synagogue in NYC. Past our section was the S. Korean one, next was Indian, etc., etc. I heard some pretty nasty things said between the different ethnicities/sections. They all acted like separate and competing companies so needless to say everything was a mess.
I've since left that company and the industry entirely. 0/10 would not recommend.