Pros
- You are left largely to get on with the work you need to do, without much meddling - Great work life balance, I rarely had any meetings, some other employees just checked out entirely, some didn't even do any work for weeks. - Worked on some pretty fantastic projects that furthered my career and broadened my knowledge - The engineering team truly is one of a kind, I'm surprised you all still work there, really awesome people with varied hobbies and interests, you'll find a buddy in no time and settle right in - Pretty awesome events and Christmas nights out - A relaxed Friday with a game of pool is always appreciated, the business feels more like a Michael Scott ran organisation and everyone is just there to be friends, until someone's in a mood and then the entire dynamic shifts.
Cons
- Management is in complete disarray - Nepotism is pretty key in this business, nothing against any of those people working there, it's just a bad look to be honest. You won't ever win a fight when the CEO's family is your manager. - Incredible amount of staff turn over meaning morale is up and down - Wages are kept stagnant but new hires are hired on the new industry standard. You will have developers on 20-30k more than you for the same role. - You are hired on a promise of a mystical bonus system that never happens because the CEO doesn't want to pay it - You will work on projects for months that never get released and it's brushed under the carpet, complete waste of company resources - You will get last minute entire product defining scope changes, which doesn't result in a change of deadline for your bonus, so you miss out on that - You will have weeks of absolutely no work to do whatsoever because nobody is managing the team, then get blasted with 5 projects to sort out over the last month. - Management has hired new development managers which came in, offered perspective and improvements to business process, by which they then sacked them - You will complain about business process and be told it isn't changing - You will probably hate the company by the time you leave, wondering how on EARTH they are managing to stay in business, with nothing releasing - The codebase is an absolute mess, everything is a cowboy fest of trying to get it finished before it can be released, when I was there we didn't even do code reviews. - You will do numerous 9am - 5am shifts trying to get projects over the line to achieve bonuses. You will not succeed. - Management is unable to manage, the CEO calls all the shots. I spoke to my manager numerous times about achieving goals and was told under no question that they were on my side but were being roadblocked. - Information isn't really shared across teams. The engineering team absolutely has a problem whereby issues are kept in one persons head, so you need to ask that person to get it resolved. I was aware of one key issue that by the time I left still wasn't documented. - Some of the team end up working solely on new projects, which means they have no ability to maintain the current software. Training is seriously lackluster so you will spend your time seriously annoyed that some team mates aren't keeping up or being afforded the time to keep up. - Nobody wants to maintain the training because it isn't a top 5, all your work goes into top 5's because those result in bonuses. Top 5s do not carry over to the next sprint, so you have a bunch of work to do, that you won't get bonuses for, while now having a brand new set of top 5s that result in this never ending wheel of pain. - You will tell all of this to the head of development, who will also leave, thus ensuring nothing changes. - Heard far too many stories about other staff members being treated really poorly by management. - Remote work is looked down upon.