Understaffed in Critical Departments - Anonymous employee Liaison International Employee Review

Going into this job, I knew that I would be working on the development team that did the technically unglamorous, sustaining "keep the lights on" type of work for this company. I didn't expect challenging technical problems or exciting new products. That said: -Our team was ludicrously understaffed, even during the busiest part of the year -Upper management still refused to pull resources from other teams to help us -The work was soul-crushingly boring. Technically easy, but requiring insane attention to detail. -This meant that any time a team member actually got good at the job, they got promoted to one of the new feature teams, leaving the most time-sensitive, business-critical work for the most junior employees -The product team, which used to be our main source of requirements, deadlines, documentation, etc, abruptly declared they didn't want anything more to do with our team (like everyone else, they preferred to concentrate on new features). So they threw the role over the wall to the account managers, who struggled to fill the gap. -In situations where we missed a deadline or encountered deep implementation challenges, we got reprimands from upper management instead of offers of more resources (or other assistance of any kind) -The stress made even the nice, smart people mentioned above (from the account managers to middle management) yell and throw tantrums. -Developers, testers and even project managers had no say in process or development practices. They made us do retrospectives, which were a joke because we weren't allowed to actually change anything. The company is agile in name only. -On any given day, 80% of my team was working remotely (lots of locals worked from home, and half the team was in NY or India full-time). The company used Skype, which had terrible video and audio quality. Not the best thing to listen to all day while sitting in an empty office.