The management situation really couldn't be more second-rate. The CEO regularly tours prospective clients around the office and, as a show of "attention to quality", will openly critique mockups and code that is currently in-development. This is already humiliating in the moment, but the changes often go against development best practices and ignore previous considerations for other parts of the project.
Project management is equally lacking. While their existing process might work fine for a smaller company, their process places almost all responsibility on the developer. Repeatedly, I was handed designs for websites, and given a due-date (usually 2-3 months out). That was the end of the project-management process during my time. I had people I could ask about issues that came up during development, and the designers were always available, but there were no check-ins during the development process. This resulted in a large number of projects not being completed on time, and going over-budget. I know efforts have been made to remedy this, but my understanding is that many of these core problems continue to linger.
Salary was quite a slap-in-the-face, but it took some time in the industry for me to realize this. I left Poetic Systems for nearly double the salary (which was not hard), and they were disturbingly stingy with raises (all raises were only to keep up with inflation, despite being one of the more advanced team members). I have spoken with numerous other employees that have expressed the same frustrations. If you have worked in web development for any time at all, then I can almost guarantee that you can earn significantly more money.
I also expressed my desire to learn about the other development team's work (there are 2 primary teams, App Team and Drupal Team), but was instead told to focus on my current team's work.
