California R&D Office is a Joke - Employee Asurion Employee Review

The title of this review is not hyperbole — employees at the headquarters in Tennessee dismiss the teams in the California office as a joke. I’ll tell you why from a people perspective... The attitude, demeanor and knowledge level of the staff at the California office is cringeworthy. I’ll give you three examples to prove this. Firstly, there are individuals in the organization holding lead developer roles who do not know how to use git and are resistant to using pull requests and code reviewes — it’s 2017, get with the idea of collaboration. Google is your friend, research best practices for collaborative work — pull requests and git are must haves in 2017. There are other lead developers who are primadonnas who will throw a hissy fit if they don’t get their way — you’re a lead, act like a lead by your words and actions instead of using your “title” to prove you’re a lead. Thirdly, the attitude problem goes beyond frontline employees —managers will second guess your decisions at every opportunity, even if they were involved in the decision making process with you and you both agreed on the decision together. If you are a leader, have the intelligence to think through a decision, have the conviction to make the decision, and have the steadiness not to waffle on the decision later and most of all, don’t constantly second-guess yourself or your team — you are managers, act like it! On top of that, the managers that they’ve tended to hire at the California office don’t exude poise: they speak without confidence or conviction. And if you get past speaking ability, content-wise management don’t demonstrate the vision or foresight to plan more than 2 sprints ahead — many teams don’t even have a well-defined quarterly roadmap with milestones. All of these problems can be traced however to a candidate vetting process that is suspect at best. There have been candidates that were brought in, who, when interviewed, had little to no match with the qualifications listed on the job posting; these candidates shouldn’t have made it past a phone screen and instead they made it to the in-person round when we actually flew them into town for the interview!