Avoid at All Costs - Senior Programmer Rocksteady Employee Review

* Production has full control over decisions and will ignore engineering teams to do what they think is best, leading to many problems such as producers developing their own versions of tools engineers have created and forcing their use, teams being forced to do nothing but constant bug triage/fixing because all bugs are priority 0 must fix, and leads working 60+ hours a week doing data entry. * Questionable engineering practices. * Company uses Agile terminology but doesn't understand Agile methodology, instead following waterfall practices that significantly slow and hinder development. * Strong focus on time-tracking. Every hour of every week is mapped out the week before in a 15-30+ minute one-on-one planning session, and employees are expected to fill out how much time they worked on each task. * Overtime is not required, but the amount of work assigned to each person with the understanding that it must be finished for the product to be complete means people feel a strong need to work overtime just to keep up. * High-level decisions with high costs made without consulting the teams that will be impacted. * Far too many unnecessary meetings. * Unwilling to change, despite processes no longer working. "This has worked for us in the past, so we see no reason to change." * Draconian restrictions (very restrictive Internet policy, for instance) and encouragement of whistleblowing on fellow employees if they aren't following the rules. * Very cult-like yes-person atmosphere to the culture. People speaking up about problems are talked to one-on-one and told to get in line rather than making trouble. Management edicts are frequently showered in effusive praise. * Salary is comparably very low.