Pros
This company went through several incarnations...it started in the 90s being called Infocom, then it became Ioko under the same leadership, then it was bought out by fraudsters (Kit Digital), then the current management purchased what was left when the world realised Kit Digital were running a Ponzi scheme. Ioko was a great company. It had its very fair share of arrogant bellends, but it also had a healthy and growing customer base of big names, interesting tech, a can-do attitude and was generally a pleasant place to work in. Fast forward to the present, very little of that remains. Whatever remains is the only reason why you'd prefer to work at Piksel rather than in a Coronavirus testing pod. If your job doesn't involve dealing with any management, and you're lucky enough to work in one of the few good teams that remain (pro tip: avoid all teams working in the "product"), then you might actually enjoy it. Initial salaries aren't too bad, but don't count on that as I haven't seen any real pay rises in as long as I can remember. There's also plenty of flexibility to do very much anything you want...as long as you're billed to a customer and the customer isn't complaining, no problem. And if you're not billed to a customer, no one cares about you anyway. The minute you need to deal with any form of management, that's when the worst of this company will descend upon you, including all the horrendous politics that make this place so toxic. This can be an advantage: playing politics is the only way you'll ever get a pay rise or a promotion. If you're not interested in politics, move on to the "Cons" section.
Cons
I should have known better when the place was bought out by a rich guy and his cronies. The rich guy had made a lot of money building some kind of precision machinery...he had (and has) no idea of how to build software, or how to run a company that builds software. He did one good thing though: he kept around the former Ioko boss as CTO, who knows these things well and made Ioko a success. But, the CTO is not interested. He's not involved and he's probably too busy dealing with his other businesses, and that has paved the way for a bunch of charlatans to run the show. A few years ago the newly rebranded Piksel decided it was no longer going to do what it knew how to do (sell professional services) and instead it was going to become a "product company". Great idea, obviously they were gearing up to sell from the start, and a "product company" is much more valuable than a "services company". 5+ years later, no one knows what the "product" does, and the only real customer that's using it hates it. The tech is an absolute mess, there is no vision or objectives and the only consistency in all this time has been the protection of egos and the burying of heads in the sand. Needless to say, no one wants to pay for such omnishambles and the many times 7 figure kind of amounts poured into this black hole will never, ever, not in a million years, be recouped. This wouldn't be too bad if other parts of the business were healthy. Everyone has at some point in their lives trusted an idiot, or thought too much of something relatively worthless. The problem is that in between, Piksel's management has left everything else to rot and die. So the revenue streams have become atrocious. Piksel's management know this and they have to file it every year to Companies House. They choose to lie to staff that the numbers look bad because of internal accounting, but lies are still lies even when the liar tries hard to sound convincing. Even so: failed long term project, numbers not looking so good...Piksel wouldn't be the first company to come back from a near-death experience, would it? If only they were honest. This is where the house of cards properly comes crashing down. The company culture is appalling. Even middle managers are out to get you. Some have grasped the concept that they can sell their soul for a few more quid and a nicer title...and boy oh boy, do they live and breath by that. It's completely rotten at the top, and the fetid emanations drip down to all levels - except perhaps the lowest team levels, which may be the only ones spared. Piksel's management doesn't believe in communicating. Whenever they are forced into it, they're dishonest and prefer saving face to behaving like adults. They promote and reward sycophantic behaviour, and have become so trapped in their own mess that they will continue plowing forward until there is no company left. This is a real risk: Piksel's finances are so bad that its survival depends on the whims of a madman. DO NOT work here if you need any form of job security. Piksel is a sad place these days. Forget the anecdotal stuff like the office is grotty, they do rubbish background checks and the car park is a mile away for newer starters. That wouldn't matter as much if this was still a pleasant place to work in.