Management is by fear, intimidation, and public humiliation. This yields a crass, belligerent, and unnecessarily stressful environment with high turnover rates. Overall the company’s personality is best described as bi-polar with huge mood swings from one day to the next depending on the volume and intensity of the day’s emergencies. And there are emergencies virtually everyday.
Software development process is completely devoid of present industry standards and proceeds in a undisciplined, undocumented, and unpredictable manner. This style may have been common startups in the late 90’s when the company was founded, but nowadays no one does it like that anymore. There’s very good reasons why most importantly: 1) it produces huge amounts of defects, and 2) it incurs huge amounts of tech debt. Both of which are on clear display at SBI.
The company literally takes the 80-20 rule and flips it on its ear: 20% of your time building, 80% fixing, and nearly 0% designing. I could not believe the huge variety and number of defects and excruciatingly bad design decisions, most of which should never have gotten into production. There are rumblings of modernizing this, but I have not seen any of the artifacts of this kind of unwinding effort, such as analysis documents on process flows, functional definitions, or even a ERD.
