I joined a scale up in the BNPL space as head of data engineering.
It was one of the most poorly managed IT environments I'd ever seen.
There was so much technical debt, that basic systems where literally dead or dying (day 3, Tableau stopped working), and while I did my absolute best to address it, the constant overarching priorities were always more data, and faster data. Reliability, security, performance was my problem to deal with. (As well as literally anything technical, yes even configuration of mail clients).
The demands for solutions came thick and fast from the head of data science and where always clear as mud, yet I was pushed to the wall on immediate and unquestioning commitment for data projects and was held accountable for dates regardless of the resources, capacity, dependencies or technical debt we were fighting on daily basis.
Attempts to push back on any commitments or seeking clarification or coming back with a different solution were often met with my manager telling me, publicly in meetings, that I was going against company principles. At other times the head of data science would get extremely angry and storm out.
I ended up having to track our team's time, and I remember at one point in time in a quarterly planning session (that they had just transitioned to ) we could actually see how under resourced we where because based on our estimates (backed by data, tracked meticulously by time) of projects they expected in that quarter we could justify a 10x increase in our resources.
This apparently shocked them and us so much, they ( my manager and some other data representative) penned a pretty crazy letter to the CEO basically saying all the work the team had been doing for the last X years (since I joined) was wrong and bad and etc etc... completely unfounded. I only found out about it because the CTO raised some eyebrows on some of the claims. I ripped it to shreds pretty much questioned every claim with counter examples, and they had to throw it away.
It was one of the most poorly managed IT environments I'd ever seen.
There was so much technical debt, that basic systems where literally dead or dying (day 3, Tableau stopped working), and while I did my absolute best to address it, the constant overarching priorities were always more data, and faster data. Reliability, security, performance was my problem to deal with. (As well as literally anything technical, yes even configuration of mail clients).
The demands for solutions came thick and fast from the head of data science and where always clear as mud, yet I was pushed to the wall on immediate and unquestioning commitment for data projects and was held accountable for dates regardless of the resources, capacity, dependencies or technical debt we were fighting on daily basis.
Attempts to push back on any commitments or seeking clarification or coming back with a different solution were often met with my manager telling me, publicly in meetings, that I was going against company principles. At other times the head of data science would get extremely angry and storm out.
I ended up having to track our team's time, and I remember at one point in time in a quarterly planning session (that they had just transitioned to ) we could actually see how under resourced we where because based on our estimates (backed by data, tracked meticulously by time) of projects they expected in that quarter we could justify a 10x increase in our resources.
This apparently shocked them and us so much, they ( my manager and some other data representative) penned a pretty crazy letter to the CEO basically saying all the work the team had been doing for the last X years (since I joined) was wrong and bad and etc etc... completely unfounded. I only found out about it because the CTO raised some eyebrows on some of the claims. I ripped it to shreds pretty much questioned every claim with counter examples, and they had to throw it away.
At that point I quit.