Allm Reviews

Company: - Compensation package is very poor. The total value is at least 20-30% under industry average, and it's badly structured. Base pay is very low, which reduces the size of half-yearly bonuses and the impact of pay rises, and some benefits are lost if not used and/or are difficult to use. - Performance reviews are a joke. Goals for the first half of each review period are completely meaningless, and goals for the second half cannot be changed once set, even if changes in business priorities render them unachievable. - High performance is not rewarded. Even an extremely good performance review is likely to result in perhaps a 2-3% pay rise. - Professional advancement is not recognised. Significant improvements in skills over time do not result in re-evaluation of the compensation package. - Remote work is (still) not permitted, despite management saying for years that they're going to set it up. - Staff retention is not considered important. The company is perfectly happy to lose and replace staff despite the enormous financial and non-financial costs involved. Multiple employees with particular needs have had no option but to resign because the company has refused to change its policies to meet those needs (in particular, remote work). - Startup image is projected, but atmosphere and way of working is nothing like a startup. Company was founded nearly 20 years ago, and it shows - in many ways it's closer to a traditional Japanese company. - High inertia and resistance to change in most areas of the company. This often boils down to "we've always done things that way". - Management says a lot but generally does very little. It's difficult to trust that they will do anything they say. - There was no dedicated HR team for nearly two years. During this time it was not clear who was responsible for HR matters, and HR related inquiries were sometimes poorly handled (slow or no response, non-answers, failure to address the inquiry, etc.) - Very poor office environment. There are a lot of people in a small, open plan space, so desks are too small, it's very noisy, and air quality is bad (CO2 levels, temperature, smell, etc.) - Positive social interactions are not promoted. Foreign and local team members are not well integrated, there are very few company events, and there's only a very limited culture of interacting outside of (and sometimes even in) the workplace. - Overly hierarchical. Despite having only around 75 employees, staff can be separated from the CEO by up to 5 intermediate employees. - Simply put, a mediocracy in which maintaining the status quo is the most important consideration. Project (Product): - Plagued by a lack of vision. Management don't seem to know or even be concerned about what to do next, or even with the future direction of the product. - Has been essentially stagnant for years, during which hardly any features have been added or even changed. - CEO and upper management have very limited involvement in the project, even when it's on fire and customers and stakeholders are, sometimes literally, screaming for features and improvements. - Fair amount of politics, particularly at the management level surrounding ownership of the product. - Roles and responsibilities are not properly defined, resulting in duplication of work, conflict, and tasks not being completed. - Managers and leaders often don't listen, even to constructive feedback. When they do, they often either can't or won't do anything to improve the situation. - Managers and leaders frequently make assumptions rather than asking the right questions. These are quite often partially or completely incorrect, and result in a negative impact on the project and team. - Decisions that affect staff level engineers and really should involve them often don't, and are sometimes poor because of it. - Mistakes are treated the same way regardless of the context (impact on the business, number of times they've been made, skill level of the employee, etc.) In the vast majority of cases there are no real consequences, even for massive and/or repeated mistakes. - Project management is too theoretical and generic, and doesn't take into account the realities of a well established and highly complex technical software project. - Almost complete lack of technical leadership, despite the glaring need for it. - General lack of clarity, transparency, and communication, particularly surrounding project management and how teams work together. - Work flow is disorganised, unstable, and inconsistent, resulting in slow progress. Tasks that could be done in days take weeks or months, documents, workflows, and APIs change without notice, and specifications and other important documents are sometimes not finished until after deadlines for the work they're based on, or even provided at all. - Staff level engineers often don't receive the information they need in a timely fashion, or without having to ask for it (sometimes repeatedly). - Work is uninspiring. Feature work tends to focus on rewriting existing minor components in ways that provide little value to users, especially compared to new features that could be added. A large portion of the work is still maintenance. - Most code bases contain large amounts of technical debt that makes work on them difficult, slow, and frustrating. Project (Team): - Turnover has been high recently, with 3 of the 10 engineers on the project leaving in the space of 6 weeks. Reasons included remuneration, issues with management, work related stress, and conflict with other team members. - Suffers from "not made here" syndrome. Rather than following standards and making judicious use of existing, proven open source components, decisions are often made to develop custom solutions in-house. This has caused major issues and wasted a lot of time on several occasions. - There's a large emphasis on using new technologies, even if they're unproven or they involve large amounts of busy work to switch to from the existing solution (that often works just fine). - Too small to provide proper support (training, mentoring, education, leadership, etc.) for junior and even intermediate level engineers. - Too small to offer any opportunities to gain leadership experience of any kind, which drastically limits career prospects over time. - Internal communication and coordination is generally poor. This seems to be caused by a combination of the lack of well defined roles and responsibilities, poor management and leadership, and the weak communication skills and/or lack of experience of some members. - Large differences in skills, experience, standards, quality of work, motivation, and so on exist between team members, and this often leads to conflict and frustration. - Repeated and extended conflicts and frustrations have over time led to a negative team atmosphere that is now borderline toxic. - Hiring focuses too much on junior to intermediate level engineers rather than the advanced level engineers the project needs (due to it being so large and complex, and the team being limited in size for various reasons). - Hiring focuses too much on general CS skills over the specific skills and experience with specific technologies that candidates need to achieve on and contribute well to the team. This has on several occasions left team members overwhelmed and underperforming for extended periods, to the detriment of the entire team.