I’ve been with Kroger for over a decade, and I have a solid understanding of the systems and the code I’m working on. I’ve collaborated with multiple 84.51° teams, and I’ve noticed that some individuals are quick to escalate what they believe are issues, even when they aren’t actual problems. It often feels like they’re trying to prove themselves rather than first understanding the context. Unfortunately, we don’t always have strong leadership support from the Kroger side to help provide that context or resolve these situations effectively.
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Staffing in some areas is a constant game of musical chairs with TechM people in engineering and WNS in support, who never have time to gather enough context, and probably wouldn't know how even if they did. Long inter team connections get broken and have to be rebuilt every few months, nobody knows which teams do what anymore, or who's on them, random people show up and break things. It's a real nightmare.
84.51 is a shell of what it used to be. I've met some genius engineers from that org but they're long gone now. Unfortunately, they've always been plagued by type-A leaders (overwhelmingly female w\MBA and no engineering background - NO OFFENSE JUST STATING THE OBVIOUS).
These days I failed to understand why they are a separate entity or why they get paid more than folks at KTD. The gap has been closed and data analysis is no longer the boogeyman in the room... Anyone can do it
However that is at least of my concerns. I genuinely don't understand why we have a corporate office because between KTD and 84.51 were the ones running the entire business
I worked at 84.51 for 1.5 years and I agree with you that there's a tendency to escalate non-issues by many teams. I was at the receiving end with countless requests from my manager who had no idea of what the department they were leading was doing. It would end up becoming a roadblock to my actual work. I felt the KTD people were nice to work with and felt sorry that they were more stressed out than 84.51.
Could you be more specific? From the 84.51 side I have worked with KTD teams who do not understand the requirements clearly for what we are asking for and don't see why we are asking for data fields etc. In some cases, it can be as simple as we need a data connection for reporting and need these explicit fields but KTD sometimes doesn't get why we want those fields.