Frontdoor Reviews

Workaholic culture - Whenever there's a problem, it's declared "an emergency" and everyone is expected to work 24/7. Often, these "emergencies" result from upper management's poor planning, direction, lack of understanding of the complexity of our systems, and sheer incompetence. Our upper management tends to use fear based tactics to drive people to work harder. There is little overall strategy in this company other than "Get it done!!" Then they sacrifice their people to try and fix their mistakes. No matter how hard you work or what crazy systems you are expected to get up and running in their excessively short, arbitrary deadlines... expect to be told that you somehow are not doing enough or did something wrong. The expectations in this company are not realistic. As a result, this place is full of minimally functional software systems that look good on the surface but have many fundamental problems buried within them. Too few people have the time or motivation to build anything right. Upper management has a micromanagement problem. They don't let their engineers solve their problems or advise them of the best solutions. Instead, they just dictate what solution sound good to them after hearing about something for 5 minutes in a meeting... and then they just want yes men to carry it out. This problem goes all the way up to the top. For example, the CTO of this billion dollar company has been known to start telling engineers how to implement the technical details of their jobs if their code ever ends up in front of him. Doesn't he have better things to do, like run a billion dollar company, instead of getting tangled up in the details of one engineers code? Upper management is penny wise and pound foolish. They'd rather say they saved a few thousand bucks on some little detail by making everyone work long into the night than fixing the bigger, systematic issues in this company. The value of developer overtime never factors into their cost equations. If you are promised a generous amount of vacation in your offer letter, assume you will be on call the whole time you are off or just discouraged from taking it at all. Incredibly disorganized organization. Good luck trying to get anything done from someone outside your team, or even trying to figure out who you need to talk to. Expect to be blamed for not meeting a deadline by the upper management who oversee the dysfunctional corporate system. The people who run this company (up to and including the CTO) have no idea how to deploy an incredibly complex IT infrastructure system across an incredibly complex business. Instead of focusing on the big picture of how this system is supposed to work and taking the time to get it right, they get tangled up in too many details and just start telling people to fix whatever problems they find first. They usually aren't aware how their orders will impact many other parts of the system in a negative way or other priorities. Management spends too much time trying to optimize the individual components of the system and not enough time trying to optimize the overall system. They don't know how the pieces go together. Substandard benefits package is lacking some common things that most people would just "expect" to have. Be sure to read and ask about every single benefit you are offered in detail.

It’s a high-pressure environment where I had very little control over my own success. As an example, I once had a service account setup request take 2 weeks, then get locked because it was setup incorrectly and had to start the process over. All the while, I had a director pestering me about deploying to production and not understanding that—without the service account—it wouldn’t work anyway. I eventually had the pleasure of working with a fantastic TPM who knew who to sweet-talk to get such things unstuck, but he moved on and things ground to a halt again. This problem is widespread across the company with no signs of improvement and lately has gotten worse as turnover increased and teams I depend on are increasingly backlogged. The Byzantine bureaucracy could be humorous if it wasn’t combined with surreal deadlines that management imposes. For a large project my team carefully sized the features to provide an estimate. When our manager presented it to his bosses he was scolded because it wasn’t ambitious enough. We were later told, without any consultation, that we would have one third the time estimated to complete the project. This was not an isolated incident. Coming up the elevator a little before 9 one morning, a coworker looked positively haggard and confided that he’d only left the office at 3am to get a little sleep and shower but had to come back in to try to meet a similarly absurd deadline. Deadlines like that are stressful enough, but when every team depends on other teams to get things done and all those teams are under extreme time pressure for their own projects, there’s very little the engineers can do to get ourselves unblocked and keep our projects on track. It’s stressful and crazy-making. As you can imagine, morale in engineering is quite poor. It has been since I first joined, but it was causally hand waved by management for the first year and a half as a temporary symptom of the company changing for the better. Something must’ve happened a month ago because suddenly the CTO acknowledged it and promised focus groups to start addressing it. Now, a month later, no such focus groups have been scheduled and there’s no sign of improvement in sight. Again, I have no visibility into management, but it’s become obvious that they’re not able to improve the problems that are driving employees away.