Technology Departments = Toxic Culture - Infrastructure Engineer lululemon Employee Review

This company still has a "startup" mentality in the technology side of things. This means that unplanned work is king, and that little to no effort is spent on internal improvement work. In the project-based delivery environment, value is placed only on features and break-fix work. There is no recognition from leadership that technical process improvement work should take place at all. The culture in the technology teams is wildly divergent from the culture present in the rest of the business, to the detriment of the technology employees. There is a language gap, where the business fascination with choosing new words for established concepts creates a communication barrier. Meeting culture is rampant, and even the engineers not seeking any type of leadership role in the company can find themselves attending more than 25 hours of meetings in a 40-hour work week. DevOps is not treated as a management practice; Agile is given lip service with portfolio and project managers constantly seeking a "hybrid waterfall" approach to managing work. Management seem largely unaware of what kind of work each team does, and consistently recognize the wrong people. A core value of lululemon is "Entrepreneurship" yet any idea that is perceived to challenge the status quo is discouraged by middle management. Interactions with direct managers are encouraging, however communication with other levels of management are characterized by a distinct lack of understanding of the technologies and issues and even business logic at play. Purchases of tools are treated as a panacea to chronic issues, but there is no evidence that architects or directors have reviewed requirements and identified a tool that is fit-to-purpose. Reliance on professional services will frustrate engineers looking to develop a set of skills with new and interesting challenges. Management style leans heavily towards shifting blame, scapegoating is common, messaging inconsistent, and measure of success completely subjective, or based on subjective measurements like surveys. Though feedback is requested, it is not honoured, and contributes to a culture of fear. Double speak, revisionism, and "weasel words" are commonly employed by architects, directors, program managers, and others. Many systems administrators, unfamiliar with the shift to automation and code in the industry, seem to do less and less work, requiring contractors and newer full time employees to do the lion's share of the tasks required to complete a project. Micromanagement is common. Accountability is extremely low at all levels of the company. Performance reviews are once per year, and although they factor into the bonus schedule, the highest level of compensation is commonly held to be completely unattainable. There are few, if any, global standards, and indeed the implementation of standards that could reduce duplication of work are actively discouraged. It is a heavily siloed environment, with few people talking outside their immediate teams, and then only if they need something. There are multiple ticketing systems, multiple ways to receive work, multiple places to store documentation, multiple cloud provider solutions, multiple directories, multiple levels of approval for the simplest changes. Was surprised to begin looking for similar work in the industry and find that lululemon was not competitive in the market compared to offers from other companies. Raises were frozen during the 2020 pandemic, and Paid Time Off was reduced, yet despite the pandemic, profits and stocks soared, which made these measures incredibly self-serving.