Complaints about current job

• We heavily rely on client environments. We send servers to clients who insist on doing all sorts of things to them, including domain join the Windows VMs, install AV agents, add group policies, insist on arbitrary settings changes, and even steal root passwords without asking and refuse to give them back.
• "Optics" are very important to clients. What we do doesn't matter as much as what we appear to be doing. This effectively means we lie to our client base.
• There is no reward for correctness or unsexy proactive mantenance or tech debt payoff. Dashboards and fancy GUIs get approval and attention, even if they come with added complexity and aren't really all that useful.
• All our testing is done in production. We do not have a single in-house "pre-prod" or "mock" or "test" environment. Client servers have test environments, but they are almost never used, to the point they're usually always broken and not useful for testing.
• We have no decent monitoring and alerting, only an appareance of having it, and nobody seems to care.
• The squeaky wheel gets the grease - loud mouths get what they want, whereas presenting evidence and documenation gets met with blank stares.
• The founder/former CEO makes random irresponsible $10k+ purchases that are ill informed.
• We won't spend money on anything, unless it's more ridiculously over-specced laptops, or servers with far too much RAM. We don't even have spare disks for the servers we run on-prem. We don't monitor client servers for hardware failure.
• We hired a guy saying "yeah, let's do cloud stuff" and he never got to do cloud stuff, and left. He was fantastic, but horribly under-appreciated by management and left because of that.
• The organization is very top-heavy, and has a lot of people doing sales or managing client relationships (again, for optics) and comparatively few technical people.
• We won't pay for some necessary software licensing, but we bought a whole new building.
• The main product is basically a feature, not a product. We are ostensibly an "AI" (machine learning) company. With the "AI" boom this past year, if we don't keep up we're going to be left behind. And I really doubt our ability to keep up.
• It was suggested by my direct report that we lie to a prospective client and copy data off site without telling them, even though it was implied it wouldn't leave the site.
• One of the people who does the "real work" (my job being just a support job at the end of the day) really very much dislikes me. This person is a blowhard, a windbag, who speaks quite a bit about previous experience high up in important companies, but does not have much to show for it. This person shockingly seems to be well regarded in the company by management but not by any of the technical people.
• The technical people are overworked, underpaid, and pretty much all flight risks because of how much we all do support work instead of our actual jobs.

We were put in a really bad position by the previous tech teams. At some point, we were all on linux-based services, then a new team rewrote everything as windows apps, which brought windows back into the environment. Now we're trying to get off of it again because it's a horrible platform to be on, of course. But there's been a lot of this thrashing over the last 10 years. There's been a lot of turnover because of the work environment and the absurd technical limitations, and that creates problems, and instability, and that creates high client churn as well, and the clients that do keep us don't trust us, and so we get things like clients domain joining our stuff and putting AV agents on it to keep an eye on us. This creates a terrible work environment. On top of that, all of our servers are metaphorical ticking time bombs because of some dependency on a confluence of a few awful pieces of technology. The people who make those decisions hire those same types of people, and they're still here, and they keep coming and getting positions of power.

When I took the job, I thought, "I'm either gonna be here for 5+ years, or less than one." I'm leaning toward the latter now. It's getting really difficult to work here, being pulled in so many different directions at once, primarily doing course correction and client work that drags on and on because of scope creep. When the other guy was here it was a bit easier, but with just me, it's really tough, and I wouldn't really feel bad about leaving this company in a lurch. There's a pattern of awful behavior here that I don't have the power to stop, and I don't see it getting better any time soon.

(Also despite the company being around for 8 years in its current form, and ~20 years before that, it's still considered a "startup"?)

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