Poor management. Not the right environment for any developer. - Junior Software Developer Kaboodle Employee Review

1.0
17 Oct 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

As a junior working there you will learn things, but this will only be showcased by developers instilling bad practices. Working festivals is a bonus but you will be expected to work very long hours. You do get holiday in lieu but whether you get chance to take that holiday is another story. You do get chance to have your say on products and decisions but these will be quickly overturned by the senior developers and upper management. If a good idea is created by a junior developer it will be rebuked and then later on the senior developers will use that idea as their own.

Cons

There is no ethos behind teaching anyone. Management have said that 'Senior developers aren't there to teach people'. - That being said they've denounced the 'term' senior from some of these developers so they can get away with doing as little as possible such as selling things on eBay. As above there is leniency within the company, so much so that developers are able to fall asleep at their desk without any repercussions. Since my time starting at Kaboodle, 8 people from the development team have left with only 2 new rehires (the development team currently consists of a contractor, 3 seniors and 1 junior), now with no QA team. They believe that the seniors are always right and most of the product knowledge is held currently with a contractor (who built the system). Current senior developers do not listen to code reviews and mark it as a stale review or 'resolved' if they disagree with it, without having a proper conversation about it. Still using old technologies such as JQuery (1.7), and still have products on SVN - upper management seem to be quite averse to Git. Any 'new' technologies seem to be shut down in a quick fashion because the senior developers have no experience with them. The term 'TDD' makes the current development team shake as currently they're all vehemently against testing their work, inevitably hot-fixes are needed on a regular basis and talking amicably with QA's seem almost impossible.

Explore other reviews about Kaboodle

3.0
12 May 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good opportunity to work in events

Cons

Not great management. Owner and director, very nepotism based. Not much room to develop.

1.0
21 May 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Previous discount on food and drink now taken away

Cons

Difficult work environment and stressful management

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