Pros
Enjoyed the variety working for other departments,even if it did mean doing 70+ hours a week. Fellow telebrokers were willing to swap shifts with me to enable me to carry out duties for other departments
Cons
The challenges were mainly having to cope with the majority of middle managers who were absolutely clueless,and in most cases useless. I encountered at least 10 in my time (mainly because of the different departments i worked for),MOST appeared to have been employed ONLY on who they knew rather than what they knew!! I was there in the pre-flotation days,and although Betfair made profits in those days,those profits were a LOT LESS than they should have been due to CLOWNS at the top. I was mainly in Stevenage where the director was about as much use as using a hockey stick to return a Nadal serve!! A departmental manager once told me 'We pulled the wool over her eyes left,right and centre' The result was the employment of more 'yes' people who were of little use in driving the company forward and were just an unnecessary expense. In my early working years (not in the betting industry) I was told by the oldboy of my department that a person at the top won't employ someone better than him/her because they will be a threat,so he employs someone not as good as him. That next person does the same and so one,resulting in a dilution of talent from the top downwards. That was Stevenage to a tee and from what I saw at Hammersmith it looked similar there. Those sort of frustrations were evident in at lest 3 very talented and knowlegdeable people leaving. As I am still in contact with ex colleagues I have learnt that a lot of those 'managers' I described were dispensed with,so it appears I was not the only person who saw them as a problem. Alas one of two managed to avoid the axe
