One Step Forward, Two Steps Back - Software Developer YPrime Employee Review

There continue to be massive communication gaps in the company. Things are constantly being changed and reorganized without addressing the real problematic processes (or people) and without getting any feedback from the employees who will be affected by said changes on a daily basis. An incredible amount of time and resources were spent trying to make YPrime an Agile company. There was a false notion among management that it would increase productivity across the board, but it has done the opposite. The only meaningful/novel lesson of Agile is to deliver working software in small frequent iterations, but we had nothing to gain from this since almost all of our projects are already on short timelines (a few months at most). So all we got out of the Agile transformation were the numerous weird rituals that distract everyone from the real work that needs to be delivered to our clients. The results have been: - Even more meetings - Even more time tracking - Even more messing around with ticket boards - Even more micromanagement - Even more personnel changes - Even more bouncing between projects (zero focus) - Even more politics - And of course, overexposure to all the absurd buzzwords that come with the Agile obsession At least half of the developers here are "study devs" and it is an awfully thankless job. For each new project (clinical trial), the study devs fork off of a central repository, which is a base version of the product, and customize the code based on the study's requirements. There is an enormous problem here, because the base repository is developed upstream by a totally separate team of devs who: - Operate in complete autonomy - Add/remove features at will (nobody knows where their requirements come from) - Have little to no experience with real studies and what they typically require - Do not document their code at all, despite a lot of it being messy - Do not communicate any important changes - (Bonus) refer to themselves as "full-stack engineers" and do not associate with the rest of the devs unless there's a five-alarm fire As each new version of the base product is on the verge of release, the folks in management/sales start selling new studies that will feature this new version. However, what they fail to realize time and time again is that the base product is still absolutely loaded with bugs and missing features. So many promises are left unfulfilled and each study is sold under a false assumption that the base product is in good working condition. Then the lowly study devs are left on their own to sort out the chaos -- frantically trying to figure out what changed and how to fix everything, all while being mandated to stick to the original naive timelines. In the end, most of the feedback falls on deaf ears, most of the fixes/features don't get incorporated back into the base product, and the cycle repeats again and again.