Pros
Some of the people here are fantastic (more on this in cons). Get to work with some nice tech. Recruits grads which gives them some key experience early in their career. The social club is trying their best to make the place fun to work by organising social events even during lockdown. There is some room for career growth (more on this in cons). Some top tier clients using the product.
Cons
Where do I start. For the the current market, the salary is pathetic. I almost DOUBLED my salary just by switching jobs (my new job had less responsibilities than my job at Alex). Couldn't be further away from the truth when someone describes the salary as "competitive". Furthermore, the salary is a package meaning your base salary is actually lower. There is recognition for great work via shoutouts and nominations, although this does not pay the bills. The best you'll get is a $50 voucher. No longer recruiting any experienced developers in Melbourne likely because of the low salary. Promotes internally to undeserving individuals who are not skilled rather than recruiting someone who knows what they're doing - likely salary related. Most of the new recruits are in cheaper regions such as India to avoid paying an Australian rate. Zero benefits. No insurance discounts, equity (I found this very odd considering the massively below market salaries & the fact the company is a start-up), no WFH budgets, deals or discounts at big brands etc. How can the company attract great talent when remuneration and benefits are so poor. The marketing team is great - they could sell sand to the Arabians. The company is expanding its customer portfolio and beating some of the giants. Truely inspiring. However, there is no capacity from an engineering stand point to facilitate this kind of growth. The product is riddled with bugs and tech debt, and developers spend most of their time trying to address it. The number of developers is diminishing at a faster rate than the company can recruit. It's rather concerning when senior employees are leaving frequently. The "cloud team", or IT support team, is stretched so thinly that you're waiting weeks for an infrastructure ticket to be actioned. This has made onboarding and completing other development tickets a nightmare. Serious lack of engineering leadership in some teams. Technical expertise is limited resulting in some poor quality software. Dysfunctional ways-of-working dictated from the top - look at what some of the top companies are doing and take inspiration from that. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel. When I came to Alex, I was promised a personal career development plan. Over my time here, there was some talk regarding this but nothing came to fruition. As managers left the company, so did any work contributing to career development frameworks. I decided it was no longer worth my time waiting for this as I was wasting my time. Some developers have done amazingly well, but this is the result of their own labour and almost no career advice from the company. There was a buddy program, some actively continue but most have stopped caring. Some of the big clients have so much leverage over the company it's scary. As a result, some bizarre features have been implemented and priorities often change quickly in-order to please them. The annual bonus, albeit at the discretion of management, was simply ignored this year. Not even an email was sent out letting employees know that it would not be happening. Management went out for an EOFY dinner with each other to celebrate, leaving everyone else out. Senior management is like an old mans club. Get some diversity up there. Review your org structure. Some of those in management, I had no idea what their job was or what they did. Some of the reviews on this are very suspect. Almost like they have been written by those in the company and were asked to write something nice.