Product Owner keeps demanding developers do items outside of Sprint, deleted story points to get extra items in, signs off holiday for my staff, even hired some unqualified developers, etc. for my team (I'm the Dev Manager). I'm blessed to report into the PMO who backs up the Product Owner, in front my own reports, meaning I have no authority. What would you do?

PMO has decided that if we drag items from Sprint to Backlog when they reach SIT, we have more space for Dev items in the Sprint :-| Though he expects developers to actually do the SIT work, including writing the SIT tests :-|

Engineering Director thinks it would be best to have the developers in all the major regions of the world.... that is, the developers in the same squad..... someone in USA, someone in Western Europe, someone on Asia, etc.. ......so there is always someone to talk to customers....

(why do we have a flipping product owner then?!)

......oh hell, the stand-up is going to be interesting... when do we do sprint planning?! ...what about the retro??

When the Product Owner is so angry about Agile that he removes all the Dev team from JIRA?!?! Then has a tantrum about nothing being delivered.... hmmm... because, mate, we can read your flipping mind!

I have been told that post lockdown, I must commute hours each day to the office in London. This really makes sense, considering that my reports are not in London, but based in India. The product owner is in India. My line manager and his manager are in the USA. There's no one in London I work with.

I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.

They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.

If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.

The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.

Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.

They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.

PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.

Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.

Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.

The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.

You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.