Pros
Competitive salary. Some good junior engineers who haven't yet been ruined by the environment.
Cons
Where to start. Engineering leadership has no grounding in modern software engineering practices. Foundational work like CI improvements, contract testing, and automated test infrastructure is actively devalued. I was told I was doing "too much technical work" after discovering builds that had been silently broken for years and test suites that had never actually run in CI since they were created. I didn't just identify the problems, I fixed them and left the infrastructure for others to use. I introduced contract testing using industry-standard tools (Pact, Specmatic). Months after being told to stop because I "must be getting bored of it," leadership asked the team how to solve the exact problem the contract testing already addressed, completely unaware the work had been completed. The QA team, whose primary function is manual regression testing, was then directed to build a custom mock framework from scratch instead of using the proven tooling already in place. This same team also calls itself QE and writes "automation tests" in isolation from the development teams. They can't even decide what they are. If you need a dedicated team to write your tests for you, your engineering culture has already failed. They have consultants from a well-known agile consultancy embedded and even they are doing feature branching, not trunk-based development, not writing proper test automation. Their engineering contribution includes "enriching" shared JSON objects: one mutable god object full of optional nulls and empty strings representing 50+ different transaction types, where impossible states are not only possible but common. Instead of creating proper message types for each transaction, everything is crammed into one bloated payload and passed around between services with no schema constraints, no contracts, and no validation. When something breaks, nobody knows which service mutated what, or when. Two organisations that should know better, and neither does. There is no psychological safety. When I raised architectural concerns, specifically how the org structure violated Conway's Law, with ~50 people across 9 teams sharing microservices without domain boundaries, the response was a formal "expectations" message rather than any technical engagement. Process improvement proposals were dismissed as "just presentations," then leadership delivered their own presentation two days later. I explicitly told my manager that the feature factory / long-lived branch / pull request model was the reason I'd left previous companies, and that I'd likely last about a year in that environment. I was subsequently assigned to a team operating under exactly that model. Either the feedback wasn't retained, or it was deliberately ignored. A greenfield project opportunity went to an engineer whose current work had a broken build for two weeks. There was no conversation about interest or suitability with other team members who had demonstrated stronger delivery track records. The principal engineers think they're clever at attempting an old consulting trick: if you identify problems they should have caught, they load the fix onto you. It's a deflection. The problem becomes your responsibility, and their failure to spot it disappears. Raise enough problems and suddenly you're doing "too much technical work." Accurate technical assessments get reframed as attitude problems. I used the term "Distributed Monolith" to describe the architecture, a well-known industry term, and was told this was "disparaging" and "negative," and that holding that opinion would "isolate" me. That's not feedback, that's gaslighting and fearmongering that borders on bullying. Meanwhile, the majority of my peer feedback praised me as a mentor, a leader, and a go-to person for technical guidance. The message is clear: identify problems that leadership is responsible for or doesn't want to hear about, and the problem becomes you. The entire organisation has fallen into agile theatre. Pure cargo culting: ceremonies without understanding, frameworks without foundations. They went all-in on LeSS, which is the problem in itself, not just the implementation. In my department alone ("Money Management"), ~50 people divided into 9 teams all sharing the same services with no domain boundaries. And that's just one department. Large refinement sessions where stories are pre-estimated by people who won't implement them, and they call it agile. The result is a distributed monolith masquerading as microservices, operated by a framework that assumes shared codebases. Nobody questions whether any of it is working because nobody is measuring flow. When someone does measure it and presents the findings, it gets dismissed. The company values talk about being a "catalyst of change" and "willingness to break norms." In practice, challenging the status quo results in formal warnings rather than collaborative problem-solving. On a personal level, one of the more disappointing realisations is that the product enforces Sharia compliance. I regret contributing my skills to building a system that operates under a religious legal framework I fundamentally disagree with. I was on an Employment Pass in Singapore, which meant leaving wasn't as simple as handing in notice. Had I been working in my home country, I would have left within the first few weeks once the dysfunction became apparent. Instead I'm stuck with this revolting blight on my resume.