Pros
Unlimited holidays Company retreats Good benefits
Cons
The team I joined had some very serious problems. The communication in the team was dire. For the first 2 months of my time there, i didn't speak to my manager at all apart from 5 minutes 3 times a week in standups. The person in charge of mentoring me stopped responding to my messages after 2 or 3 weeks and in general was rude and unhelpful, until it was time for my reviews in which he would claim I "can ask him for help whenever" which was not true. I never felt at all accepted, respected or even welcome in the team. There were specific member(s) who were always very helpful and kind, but overall it was really quite unpleasant. Nobody had time to help me with anything, and asking for help seemed to be viewed as sacrilegious and bothersome. It was extremely isolating and took a toll on my mental well being outside of work. Something the overarching company values claims to be of utmost importance to them. They didn't plan sprints / releases in advance, or estimate any tickets. This led to very strange liminal periods in which a sprint / release was code complete but the work for the next one wasn't planned and while the VERY stretched small QA team did regression testing, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. On top of this, nobody wanted to hear from me so when I did ask for new work I was made to feel like a bother. After 3 months of this happening every release I just gave up trying to get new work in these periods. I raised this in retros every time and it got shut down every time. I even had tickets moved out of sprints/releases while I was working on them with no communication from anyone. Operationally speaking, this was probably the worst engineering team I have ever worked for. I regularly asked for help in our team slack channel and was repetitively completely ignored. Sometimes (if i was lucky) someone would respond a week later when it was no longer relevant. This is a clear symptom of a team lacking in appropriate bandwidth. I was scalded and got in a lot of trouble (and was consequently let go) for struggling to deliver a very large unestimated complex piece of work that was poorly defined and planned. In my review I tried to explain why it was so difficult. I had been in the team for 3 months at this point and had a complete lack of any onboarding or real support during this time. I definitely made mistakes in the task and took responsibility for this but my manager and the previously mentioned "mentor" were incredibly disrespectful. They were convinced this task was simple, as something similar had already been done (which was not correct) and not interested in what I had to say about why it wasn't. Overall it was a horrible and frankly toxic experience.
