This was an excellent read. I worked at a company that did almost all of these. An absolute fanatical focus on velocity to the exclusion of everything else coupled with complete disconnect between story points and the time to actually implement the ticket. Total and complete failure to deliver almost every sprint. Every developer had to deliver a minimum of 10 points a week. Each sprint was 1 week. If you did not deliver 10 points you were written up. Jr. or Sr. and the points were estimated by the Sr. Devs. So the only way for a Jr. to hit their 10 points was to work 70 hours for months and years on end.
I left a couple years ago but when I left the system was absolute garbage and every week leadership was astounded that progress was not being made while only focusing on the number of points closed. Company is publicly traded and will potentially go out of business in 6 months. I was written up at the start of covid for hitting 8 points 2 weeks in a row. Right when everything shut down, schools closed etc.
When I quit, every Sr. engineer left within 6 months, ~50% of the engineering staff.
Wow, that's crazy. Is it possible to find this out while interviewing? My worry is some company might be willing to pay high salaries to new hires to recover from situations like these, but it would suck for me to join such a place.
I always ask my potential peers how they feel. Are you stressed, relaxed, happy, sad, mad, excited, ambivalent. What works great, what needs improvement. Ask them directly: are you happy with your scrum/agile process? Be careful though as just the words might trigger some ;) If they won't let you talk to your peers and instead you only get to talk to the manager and team lead, be wary: they might be trying to escape & say anything to hire new people. And if they say they are very very excited to have you on board, I'd say that's worrying too, unless you are some kinda rockstar. Also check out Glassdoor and other review sites.
I left a couple years ago but when I left the system was absolute garbage and every week leadership was astounded that progress was not being made while only focusing on the number of points closed. Company is publicly traded and will potentially go out of business in 6 months. I was written up at the start of covid for hitting 8 points 2 weeks in a row. Right when everything shut down, schools closed etc.
When I quit, every Sr. engineer left within 6 months, ~50% of the engineering staff.