UrbanCode Reviews

Since the company was acquired by IBM, there has been humongous growth in the span of a short period of time. This has caused them to have a lack of developers, which has hindered the speed at which they can fix the bugs arising (as well as bugs that had existed prior to acquisition). However, they are currently hiring, so this issue will resolve itself as time moves on. The fact that many things "have always worked like that" can lead people to not want to change things when they need changing. I found this created unnecessary friction in the office space that otherwise would have been really easy to resolve. At times, it could feel like whoever was most revered / talked the loudest got what they wanted in the product feature as oppose to what should have been done (e.g. the logical decision) IBM processes get in the way of actual feature productions because of how terrible their SSO system is. I have upwards of 13 passwords at least, and resetting them happens every 3 months or so. Oh, and if forget that your programs are set to auto login, you can get locked out of your account for 24 hours without the ability to reset. If you aren't careful, you can get sucked in and loose your work life balance because there is always a deadline, and constant, what I would call, "fire drills". There is something always wrong that needs fixing or getting out. And while that is part of the software development cycle, the pace at which it happened while I was here grew tiresome and felt like things again could have been avoided if the team were focused on bringing down the technical debt instead of doing feature development. Some of this I would attribute to the relax take on Agile, and poor timelines around sprints.

Development of new product was sometimes slow, but that is inherent in a development organizations.