Marie Curie Reviews

Pros

You are important to them not just a number. You can put your family first and work second and are encouraged to do so, MC make you feel valued,

Cons

Been working for them for a year and still not found any cons

Pros

The people really do make it, everyone is lovely, creative and motivated. The CEO is moving the charity in the right direction

Cons

Not very diverse and hard to see a way for progression.

Pros

Flexible work. Good support for employees

Cons

Hourly rate of pay could be better. No payment for travelling to and from work

Pros

The ethics and work of HCAs and RNs is fantastic, second to none. Decent in-house training. Regional ROA network supportive.

Cons

Poor salary does not reflect the workload and very toxic office/working environment (due to poor management). Poor regional management. No progression, but only from an administrative point of view.

Pros

Good cause that really helps those living with a terminal illness. Flexible working hours properly introduced in the last year which is great for those who are parents or provide care.

Cons

In my (almost) 5 years I have seen the same products re-written every year for little or no financial return. The cost of these projects is extortionate and quite disgusting when you consider the main revenue stream is from public donations and fundraising. Contractors are bought in for months at a time at a high cost and delivering an ok product which will then be written again the following year. Agencies are kept on retainer and used monthly at 4x the cost of what an internal development team would be but investment is never made in an internal team. Therefore there is a high turnover of staff each year and the domain/company knowledge is lost every few months. This creates more bugs, poor quality products and leads again to ... re-building the same products (but better apparently)! But there is usually a new member of staff leading this who will then leave the following year. There is a training budget that is never used on internal staff. There is no career progression or opportunities and therefore you have to leave to get a better role or more money. The project planning is poor and only short term considerations are made leading to money loss and poor products. There is a big blame culture, I have seen lots of bullying, people paid several months notice to leave the company and people in paid employment when they are not doing there job because that's easier than a disciplinary with HR. In 5 years, I saw a couple peaks where the team was happy and then key staff left, the problems began again and the morale continued to be low. In 5 years, I actually had 6 different tech leads, my line management changed 3 times , my department structure changed 3 times with two rounds of redundancies. That should give an indication as to how the upper management run things and how the main issues are never addressed. They are aware that each department works in silos's, causing planning and build issues, there's a new plan to address it every year but none of the staff are ever consulted on this so the key problems remain. While the leadership of my team did improve dramatically in the last year of employment under a new lead, the development team still did not feel valued and all decisions around development were made by management and non technical staff rather than consulting the experts. All the "good" work where the development team could remain up-skilled with the current industry standard, were always passed out to internal agencies. The development team were also paid vastly less than their equals in the industry (you'd expect a little less money at a charity) but were always expected to output 3x the amount of work. Roles were also allocated without them being made public internally for application. I have long list of constructive cons but no one asked me for an exit interview in order to improve the overall running of the company. If you want to work somewhere were you get paid for little work or paid little to do a lot of work, it's probably for you. If you want a challenge and to be listened to and valued, you should probably look elsewhere.