ANTlabs Reviews

This section is about support system engineer position. Unlike the other reviews here, this role is not relaxed or have flexible schedule. Actually there is some flexibilty in the schedule but is on how long you want to work after 6pm. In this department, working late is considered a good thing. Not family friendly. This role is traditionally filled by people who do not have family locally. So the expectation is for the engineer to devote all their waking hours to the job. The worst thing about this job is the standby duty. This is not like standby in other companies. This is for more like 24/7 Level 1 technical support. Before you join, you are told there is a service desk that handles the L1 1 stuff and you will be providing L2 support. So you might think, you won't be doing a lot of non-office hour work. The truth is different. For a lot of things you are actually the first line of contact. If the L1 service desk can't handle a certain case, you will also have to handle those. Add to this company also has projects where you have to respond within 30 mins. 24/7 everyday of the year. To support these projects, you may have to carry up to 2-3 laptops home. So if you are doing standby, you are not likely to get to sleep properly and you cannot leave your home on weekends. Also because the team is small, you can expect to be doing the standby often. This job also can have frequent scheduled night works. The job is working on old tech mostly. Like 20yr old operating systems. php5, perl etc. You won't be getting getting any hands on of the more up-to-date suff. Much of the work is also manual with very little or no automation. So if you are looking for a job to learn something, this is not the best job. In fact, you might learn some bad practices. Also whatever you learn it will not be very high value elsewhere. Not much training given. The team is small and frequently overworked. So not much resource to provide training. The preferred teaching method is via on the job training, sometimes by throwing you into the deep end without training and having you do lots of standby shift. See above on what doing standby means. Many things is not documented so sometimes difficult to get the information you need. If you are looking for a job with regular normal working hours, this job is not it. It will affect the way you sleep, the amount of time you can spend with your family, your health etc. If you want to take this job at least make sure the salary is worth it.

Middle tier management are mostly foreign workers and non Singaporeans. There are very frequent communication issues between this tier to the lower tiers, they don't talk much until very last minute when things are about to happen. The culture is also very different which may not suit most locals.