"Write great software that you can be proud of". That's what Zalando advertises for their developer roles. That matters a lot to me and that's what made me excited about the company.
I'm a clean coder and radical agility seemed to blend with my own professional goals perfectly: Purpose, Autonomy and Mastery. Autonomy to create well crafted software aligned with business goals (the purpose component) with passion for the work you do and improving your craft (the mastery component) in the process.
I put my own personal time into learning the skills necessary to deliver the best product I can and I have no problems with that. I love to code. I don't need the company's endorsement to do that, but feeling that you work for a company that appreciates such efforts would be nice.
Unfortunately, RA fell really short from their initial promises. I'm going to be emphatic that I worked at the Dublin office and everything I write therefore applies to Dublin, even though, it seems like there are some controversy about radical agility in their other offices including in Berlin (people claiming is not working).
I understand that they are a business, not a charity. A symbiotic relationship where I put my own personal time into mastering my craft and the company benefit from it by getting a great product is fine, but putting my own personal time into hacking things together as quickly as possible for the sake of achieving business goals is a parasitic relationship and that's not ok. I'm not a slave.
I was never given any purpose. As a matter of fact I didn't have much idea about what my team was trying to achieve until a high profile person from Berlin came to Dublin and my team presented their goals. I was given little bits and pieces from talking to people, but everyone was just too busy with their own problems. I understand that, but I just don't understand why management couldn't do that. Do they actually understand the purpose of my team? I did get a lot induction (radical agility from the creator himself, company's policies, HR, some tech intros like a STUPS one and even fast track to Scala). Also delivery and other management people would talk about what are their responsibilities, but they seem to have quite a shallow understanding of what are the team's goals. "The purpose of the team is to deliver." doesn't help me much. What I need as an Engineer is "The purpose of the team is delivering A so we accomplish B".
Either that or they just didn't fell like letting me know. Also, in practice, their actual role in the projects differ from what they told me about. Delivery lead is described as a "coach", but in practice my delivery lead ended up wanting to tell me how to do my job. As one other engineer yelled at me once "Nobody cares about unit tests!". Whatever technique I'm going to follow to deliver what they asked me to deliver is my choice. It's my choice if I decided to do TDD.
I was in Berlin for on-boarding and things seem different (at least on the surface). They have something called "product circus", where different teams show the projects they work on. As a matter of fact, in Berlin employees have a one month on-boarding and they get to choose which team they want to join. Not the case in Ireland. I felt a little depressed when I came back from Berlin, as I got to see that I was getting an inferior deal. I was not given a choice regarding the team I wanted to join in Dublin or even given the team's history, objectives, etc, before I joined.
In terms of software development processes, my team is quite poor. Nobody using continuous integration (I took this as my own task and setup a whole AWS Jenkins), not strong also on unit testing (some modules have no unit testing at all). Test Coverage for others are low, under 46% (line). Exceptions being modules I worked on.
They didn't spend much time setting up processes that actually give practical value, but they spent a lot of time setting up things that have visibility throughout the company (Google Slide presentations, Kanban boards, etc).Things more down to earth, like deployment automation, testing, CI/CD or simply "the master branch is failing tests on Jenkins" have no importance to the team.
The team works under great pressure from delivery to ship, so they often work around issues rather than fixing them and take short-cuts that end-up being ten times more costly than following the proper procedure. They have been developing Spark Jobs without working logs for months from day one... I have no idea how they were debugging it... They would deploy the full stack every time only as a work around for being incapable to deploying modules separately (because they didn't want to stop to try to fix the problem)... That cost the team several hours spent in deployments weekly...
Even though my team, as far as I can see, have been cutting corners from day one to deliver something as quick as possible (as instructed by management), somehow management in Dublin decided that their lack of productivity is due to a struggle between "Engineering Excellence" and "Creativity". Excellence is hurting productivity according to them... My team has no corners left to cut. The only person left trying to add some "engineering excellence" was myself and I was over and over "encouraged" to cut corners. No writing of "great software you are proud of" over there. At a given point I pretty much gave up saying anything. Nobody in my team or my lead ever took anything I had to say seriously (unless it would fix their immediate problems).
I complained repeatedly about these issues and was repeatedly ignored. My engineering team was frequently burned-out, stressed-out, yelling at me and other people. Zalando has a policy of "be excellent to each other" and works well, most people in the office were very nice, but in a way is artificial (it's a rule after all) and under proper stress people will break and "be excellent to each other" goes down the tubes really quickly.
I openly criticized radical agility (or more specifically the lack of) and that caused me problems. Leads came to talk to me. I was honest (maybe brutally honest), but I sensed that they actually got annoyed and didn't listen to me ("we know what we are doing" and after all my refutes against their arguments "these circumstances in your team are temporary", that's how the talk ended).
I asked to move to another team so maybe I could find that "radical agility" that eluded me. I even tried to apply to the Berlin office. I did believe in Radical Agility and I wanted to experience it.
Suddenly after I asked to move to another team (they also knew that I applied internally to a role in Berlin, which management found out and didn't seem very happy about it) they setup a "probation meeting" where they wanted to give me feedback about my performance. It turns out that:
- My technical skills are excellent.
- I work hard (sometimes weekends)
- My work is high quality (high test coverage, proper documentation, I take these seriously).
But they came also with some negative feedback that "I'm picky about the work I want to do", which I refuted. My problem was not the work itself, but the way they wanted me to do it, without following proper engineering practices (no tests, no automation, sweatshop code). What happened to "write great software you are proud of"? So there it goes Mastery flying out of the window...
Still, during my induction by my lead, I was told that I was supposed to tour the different projects within my team and choose one that I would be happy to work with. The tour never happened by the way. I tried my best to get involved into what they were doing without much response (people are busy, they have their own problems). In practice I never had any choice. They would just throw at me whatever was a priority at the moment. Sometimes when I would notice people having issues, I would try to help out, but they would pretty much push me away as soon as I fix their issues (they were pretty busy). I could not learn much about what they were doing. I would know about what they were doing with the rest of the company during presentations.
When I finished refuting their negative feedback, the strongest con left was "I don't engage in meetings" and the lead uttered this in a tone of voice that was reprehensible, like it nullifies all my other positives.
I am an introverted person. I don't like to be the center of attention, but I do provide honest feedback if I'm asked for. If Zalando has a problem with introverted people that's just fine with me, but it seems to me that they were just trying to inflate my negatives just to retaliate against my criticism.
I was told in an austere tone of voice by my lead (like I was on trial) that "my request to change teams had been denied" (without a explanation other than "we don't think that's the best for you" like I'm seven years old). I was then told at the end of the meeting that I was to report to my delivery lead, who was going to tell me what was going to be my next task. According with RA, this shouldn't happen. That's up to the team. There it goes the Autonomy down the tubes again.
That's was strike three... No purpose. No autonomy. No mastery. I decided to resign then. When I said I was resigning my lead looked at me like someone poured a bucket of ice water on his head. Their intimidation plan backfired.
I wonder what he was expecting after this. I busted my back, worked evenings and weekends, endured people yelling at me and got myself sick. I'm burned-out and still they kept scheduling these meetings to address my criticism (they seem frightened that anyone will find out that they are a fraud). They chose about the worst possible moment for this "probation meeting", which had only the purpose of intimidating into silence.
Radical Agility isn't real. Surely not in my former team, very likely not in the others in Dublin. Feels like Sasquatch to me even in Berlin.
The management in Dublin is dishonest and has no real faith in Radical Agility. They are only interested in keeping up appearances.
I'm a little ashamed to say that I would have just settled down for a non-yelling team (and a shopping mall's Santa kind of radical agility), but I was denied this request and I wasn't even asking this to happen overnight.
In the manner they bluntly refused it, not even allowing negotiation, and tried to intimidate me, just killed any hope I had to improve my situation.
I would like to finish by saying that I do think radical agility is a great idea. It's just that the people in charge in Dublin don't actually believe it and they are too afraid to let the big boss know. They are violating every single one of its core principles in hope that it will get the job done, so the big boss will not get disappointed. A bit like the "emperor's new clothes", but in this real live story the magic garments actually work.
