Pros
- Good Average Salary. Although there are big and confusing gaps between same title/same experience employees. - Excellent co-workers. I have worked in many teams but that was one of the (if not) the best team I have ever worked. PMs were all kind and they knew what they were doing, Engineering was highly skilled in numerous areas. - Kinda small team which helps with communication. - Kinda flexible hours for work, being late occasionally is not a grave problem especially if you've worked late last night. - Fast-paced environment. You do everything in a hurry (actually this is a bad thing) but in return, you see your work on production almost immediately and this is wonderful. - Looks good on CV? An international company with sector giants as their customers. Hard to find such an opportunity. - Challenging and fulfilling work. You rarely get bored with the tasks you are doing unless it is a exceptional and labor-intensive task(see cons 6th paragraph).
Cons
First of all, there are really much more downsides than upsides working at Alyo. Most of these are really big and scary red flags meanwhile some of these are minor but taste-killing irritating problems. - Unbalanced salary on the same title/experience co-workers. Let's say there are two nearly identical experienced/titled employees. They do perform close enough and their work areas are same. There could be a situation where 1st one is making 100k per year meanwhile the other is making 240k per year. Let's say 90k per year is sector average. This is unfair and irritating. - Meanwhile co-workers are excellent, upper-management is kind of hard to work with. CEO is always stressed out and his means are harsh. He was trying his best to solve this issue tho. CTO is confusing, he doesn't know what the most of the team is doing and acts like a super-developer that is not part of any team. The manager on the other hand, is a fine woman on the daily life. But on the workplace, she is scary, hard to communicate and she shares means of his brother CEO with a little bit extra on passiveness. She requests unrelated work and does not know what the engineering is doing while acting like the she knows everything and `SHE makes sure that everything is working nicely`. - Working hours on average is very high. You don't work a normal shift like 9-5 or anything. Normal working hours are 9-7 and it always stretches to a 9-10/11. Additionally, there are mandatory weekend/holiday shifts. Work-life balance is not something you can settle easily. Even if you are not on a shift, upper management has every right to call and request you to work, no overtime included though. There are meetings everywhere. You may get into a meeting flush at 7 PM and get out of it at 1AM. Also, since the customers are US based, your customer related meetings are at night. Lastly, had 70hrs per week recorded on average for 3 months and manager said "I don't think you had worked overtime". - Very old technology to work while offering working with up-to-date technologies. Most of the employees said "I was recruited with knowledge of NodeJs and offered to work with, but found out that was not the case". The tech-stack is also hard to find elsewhere since nearly every technology in use is pure and old. For example PHP but no Laravel or Symphony. HTML CSS but no React or Angular. All code is custom and anything you use will work only there. -Very old code base. There are codes that were written like 10 years ago and only the coder and god knows what it does. If you try to refactor a code file, it may take weeks to finish it. Debugging and solving bugs in that system is a nightmare for juniors and `that labor-intensive work` for mids. Unfortunate enough, you don't have time to refactor anything and you have to code the way the code base is written. Writing optimized and effective is a no-go. Every new employee struggles to understand this and gets frustrated. You have to apply a patch rather than solving the problem and you have to do it with work-around instead of doing it properly, you don't have time for that. - The `fast paced environment` gains a new meaning there, the working methodology is not TDD (Test driven development), nor Agile. Its ADD (ASAP Driven Development). Everything is ASAP, everything is P0 (highest priority). - Helping co-workers is discouraged by upper-management. They want individuals do work with little-to-no interactions. Most loved saying by the upper-management is "let every tub stand on its own bottom ". (TR:Her koyun kendi bacagindan asilir) - Low recognition and never-satisfied upper-management. There is no performance metric used at company, they have nothing objective to see if you are a hard-worker or you are doing just-enough work and pretend to work rest of the time. Pretender wins at Alyo. - Small team, there is 60 people's work to do and there are only 25 of workers. If you plan to work there, be prepared to work with 3-6 titles to fulfill.