The review system is really insane. I remember working in the SBT division on the AAPT group as an SDET and constantly being taken back by how archaic most of the practices were there. Which I can only imagine were in place because everyone was afraid to rock the boat too much or take a chance on something and come up short for their annual performance review.
On a similar vein there is just a mountain of half ass'd internal tools that only exist because someone had to mark off a checklist item on their review commitments but never bothered to maintain. Which would be fine except whenever you have to tackle a project if there's an internal solution it will always be favored over the open source or license-able alternatives.
I'd constantly get flak for asking questions of senior management like why don't we have unit test coverage, why doesn't our system allow for any sort of dependency injection, why don't we have continuous integration, why are we using this shitty internal browser test bed instead of selenium and selenium grid, etc. I spent a lot of time working on pushing modern standards around testing test code, designing reusable testing frameworks, leveraging continuous delivery etc. and to be honest it hurt my career trajectory quite a bit over what just following marching orders and writing crap code and commitment items would have done.
You should consider yourself lucky for being in the entertainment division however. That group seems a lot more progressive than most of the other divisions. The developer quality seems to be better as well. I was really horrified at the low level of competency of about 60% of my coworkers.
On a similar vein there is just a mountain of half ass'd internal tools that only exist because someone had to mark off a checklist item on their review commitments but never bothered to maintain. Which would be fine except whenever you have to tackle a project if there's an internal solution it will always be favored over the open source or license-able alternatives.
I'd constantly get flak for asking questions of senior management like why don't we have unit test coverage, why doesn't our system allow for any sort of dependency injection, why don't we have continuous integration, why are we using this shitty internal browser test bed instead of selenium and selenium grid, etc. I spent a lot of time working on pushing modern standards around testing test code, designing reusable testing frameworks, leveraging continuous delivery etc. and to be honest it hurt my career trajectory quite a bit over what just following marching orders and writing crap code and commitment items would have done.
You should consider yourself lucky for being in the entertainment division however. That group seems a lot more progressive than most of the other divisions. The developer quality seems to be better as well. I was really horrified at the low level of competency of about 60% of my coworkers.