Pros
- It was a good opportunity for graduates who are willing to learn. - It was possible to achieve a lot of autonomy for those who are fairly capable. - It was possible to take a holiday day on very short notice if needed.
Cons
- Multiple 'net-negative-producing' developers were seen as a 'fact of life' by management and never challenged. Their effect on the rest of the team was viewed as unavoidable. - Ambitions to work in an 'agile' way were regularly discarded with the slightest commercial pressure. - Senior developers were guilty of a level of 'sunk cost fallacy' in terms of persisting with poorly architected solutions. - There was an incredibly vast legacy code base which lead to developers spending a lot of time learning the existing solution rather than skills which are more universally applicable to development. - The technology stack was vastly out-dated, so a lot of the experience gained was not transferable to other enterprise environments. - Pay reviews were consistently low-balled, and required extensive negotiation regardless of an employees achievements through the year. - The office environment was managed in a very old-fashioned way in terms of quality-of-life issues, for example developers were required to wear suits and were forbidden from using headphones, even though the office was very noisy.