Toxic work culture that favors senior employees - Software Engineer HP Inc. Employee Review

Of the 4 companies I’ve worked at in CS, this was by far the worst. -VERY low pay -not allowing remote work (at least at my site) despite saying they would and having little else to offer -lots of favoritism As a junior level employee, I was pushed around, ignored, and easily blamed for things. This is because I was only there for a year and recently out of college, so I was treated as essentially disposable. This was made more clear to me by how all of the younger employees on my team (4 of them) were gone or leaving within the year. Senior level employees are treated well because they have been around long enough to understand the obscurely written code base and they have established office networks. But junior level employees don’t have a leg to stand on (and no real reason to stay), so there is a very large turnover rate. On my project, there was ZERO documentation (not even comments!) and the code is written with variable names that make it essentially unreadable unless you personally wrote it. Instead of being given any sort of support (despite frequently bringing this up to my manager), I was told to just figure it out on my own and then blamed when my progress was slow! Unlike at other companies I’ve worked at, your managers attend standups and you report your daily progress directly to them, meaning that they are constantly breathing down your necks and micromanaging. I worked very hard to keep up and my peers gave me glowing reviews for end of year reviews, so much so that I was given an extra bonus for good performance. EVEN SO, my manager was constantly upset with me (and other junior employees) in a way he never was with the senior engineers. Additionally, the technology is old and only getting worse. We were migrating to a newer code base that took I think 10 times longer to compile! If you are a senior engineer, this is probably an okay place to wait for retirement, but if you are just starting out, this is just a waste of your time. They don’t pay nearly enough to put up with this insanity. You will be applying for jobs again within a year.