Very poor technology and a consistent lack of direction from the senior management team. The company has never been profitable, and there are two or three major involuntary force reductions a year. I have never received my full bonus working at Cartera Commerce; the company has missed their numbers every quarter I have worked here. This represents a huge opportunity cost to me and my family.
I have never worked anywhere where the senior managers and department heads fought among themselves so much. There is always somebody yelling or screaming in this office, and the senior managers hide in their offices with the doors closed. I lost confidence in the company's direction and business model long ago, with the exception of the closing of the Atlanta office and the layoffs there, which I supported as a longtime employee. In Cartera Commerce Engineering, we saw the writing on the wall long ago.
Confusing system architecture and a humorously complex enterprise email system that looks like it was built on Gilligan's Island: all sticks and coconuts; The foreign guest worker programmers barely speak English and are terrible at writing code. It is tedious to work with them due to the poor communication skills and cultural differences. I have had to learn bits of Hindi just to do my programming work.
The build process is broken; Cartera Commerce has always been in need of Release Management and a continuous deployment model. I know, I know, "Lean Startup"..."Scrum"...etc., etc.
None of the senior managers have ever worked for a profitable successful company, and they seemingly have no idea how to turn a dollar.
Now, about the term "Carterrorized":
I have never worked with meaner Engineering Directors at a software company; It has been five years of "Management by crisis" for me. I am constantly either being directly screamed at, stared down at the conference table by my current Development Manager (who is decidedly non-technical) or witnessing some poor project manager just trying to do his job get screamed out of his khakis by managers with no engineering ability or management skill. At one point, Cartera Commerce basically tarred and feathered their entire PMO and ran them out of the building on a rail. I am tired of the effect this has all had on my family as well as me; Working here is a big load of stress and job security worry.
I never know if we'll have enough money or if I will keep my job at Cartera Commerce each June through August through the Cartera summer layoff season. My wife just wants to send the girls to their summer camp in Maine, so I hope I make it through this year.
When I first started working here, it was hard to code in PHP on every single layer of the application with no development framework in place. The Smarty templating engine is obsolete and makes the "Malls" (they are just landing pages really) look like they were coded in 1994.
There is no "Big Data" at Cartera Commerce. The senior architects and senior developers just sit around all day and play with map reduce scripts with no practical application. Most of them don't write any code, certainly not any production code. I have no idea how skilled they may be, as I have worked here for five years in Engineering and have never reviewed a line of their j2ee or PHP code. It must be great work if you can get it; happy for them.
The UX and UI suffers from a lack of trained user experience professionals and the inexperience of our Eastern European and Indian foreign guest workers, which comprise 75% of the programmers here.
I don't think there are any certified PMs in the"PMO": that group is always in flux, so there is never any direction on technical software development projects at all. One of the Directors there just cannot make up her/his mind. Famous last words in software development: "Phase two". I always get a sinking feeling in my stomach when I hear her/him talking about a coding project I have been assigned to; I don't think it's funny when she/he jokes about failed software projects. I get nervous around PMO Directors who joke about failed projects. This is my career and my family life at stake here. Write functional specification documents, or hire a professional certified project manager who knows how to manage a software development project, please.
I really am not really a fan of all of the new people they brought in from Intuit; Despite all the slogans on the walls, and the doublethink Orwellian office plan, there seems to be a complete lack of experience among these transplanted "Resources" with deploying actual working software. I don't think it was a great idea to hire so many people from the same former company. Overall, I would say the new people definitely hurt the ability of the company to develop and deploy interesting software products and lowered the development IQ of Cartera Commerce Engineering irreversibly.
All the talented programmers left the company this past year; the ones that were not let go that is. I have had three of my development managers let go in my five years here; I am on my fifth boss in as many years. Massive layoffs == engineering brain drain.
