Oh my...where to begin. First off, HCHB's culture is moving backwards; what was attempted to be a culture of agile and collaboration, has started to become more of a culture of waterfall and "swim lanes." For some, this might be a positive; if it is, then I would definitely recommend this place to you.
Basically, you stick to your role and nothing else. If there's a bottleneck in the product organization when writing user stories; tough luck for them, that's their problem. You are discouraged from helping. QA is having issues getting the necessary data or test cases passing? Well they need to get better and stop sucking. Developers run out of work? Don't swarm; just keep coding and dump on everyone else. And that does not mean work on tech debt. That means work on product features and keep throwing code over the wall. Your dev tests should be enough. Basically, if you are somewhat anti team and want siloed roles, then this may be a good fit.
While I understand what is trying to be accomplished; everyone should be pulling their weight, HCHB is taking this to the extreme and treating the place like it's a fast food joint and making sure everyone keeps their heads down. What I've noticed is that a lot of this is coming from middle management. If you talk to leadership and upper management, they're not this rigid so the breakdown is in the middle.
Benefits are OK, but there are some issues with them. The first is their PTO (PDO in their terms) policy which is shady. The company advertises 30 days of PTO but this is a farce and it's really 22 days of PTO with 8 paid holidays. However, the 8 paid holidays come out of your accrued time, which means that, depending when you start, you will immediately go negative on your PTO. The other issue is that THEY DO NOT PAY OUT THE PTO WHEN YOU LEAVE. Very important for people to understand this. In some states, they are not required to pay out PTO, even if it is accrued. Interestingly enough, they are in Texas and Kentucky, where it's not required . What's the point of accruing PTO time? Just give unlimited or front load it. You don't pay it out anyway.
Their education system for certain things is great, but when it comes to true training for new technology that they need the teams to handle; it's just like other companies that truly don't want to invest in this. They basically throw Pluralsight at you and tell you to go watch some videos. However, they also collect metrics that indirectly make it so you must do this on your own time, else your end of the year performance review will look lackluster. Which leads to the next major issue.
The performance metrics they collect are absolutely crazy. In the dev org, they collect the number of check-ins you make, how much you refactor, how many bugs you didn't catch before sending your code to QA for quality checks, and how much time your code spends in code review. Basically, reworking an area and making it better and having a lot of churn in an area is counted against you; so if you are experimenting with new things, trying different techniques, and doing many check-ins; it looks like you don't know what you're doing. The only metric that matters is working code, but HCHB didn't get this memo apparently.
Finally, it's a little ironic that a health care organization's health benefits start 30 days after hire. This isn't that big of a deal, but for the actual industry that you're in, having your health care benefits not start right away is a bit....funny.
