Pros
Excellent benefits including matched pension up to 10%, 5 days training, 5 days charity, great building, working with some seriously talented people.
Cons
As a developer at Sage, you will not be given time to create great code that works bug free. Instead, you’ll be under immense pressure and will have crazy deadlines for no apparent reason, sometimes bordering on the ridiculous. As a developer, you’ll be asked for estimates for development tasks, if middle management don’t like the number you’ll be given roughly half the time or they will ask someone else for a ‘better’ estimate. When things inevitably overrun, the finger will be pointed at you. In Sage, if you’re not in the old boys club (not currently accepting new members), you will never be afforded opportunities to work on bleeding edge stuff, you will however need to maintain any rubbish that they have created, forever. In Sage, if you have a track record of failure, being completely and utterly incompetent, but you kiss backside like a champion (or play golf with the boss), you’ll be promoted. Meanwhile, the very best people are either chipped away until they are a mere shadow of their former self, or leave. In Sage, you have objectives, competencies and other performance related noise that must be fulfilled, even if it means your day job suffers. You will be ‘calibrated’ against your peers to see where you sit on the bell curve of greatness. As others have mentioned, some people are going to be artificially placed on the bottom and top of the curve, which you know, is immoral, we’re talking about people with families here! In Sage, we used to have a yearly, anonymous ‘employer survey’ which included a free text section so you could be more expressive about your role. You opinion really did matter back them. Now, we’ve had a mandatory ‘temperature check’ that is *not anonymous*, includes carefully selected questions, and does not allow free text. More recently, we’ve had another survey which again, is targeted and asked such quested as: Give 3 words why you think Sage is great. What! Last year… In Sage, you may have been asked to attend a mandatory department meeting and be told when you get back to your desk you may have a ‘you’re being made redundant’ email and if you don’t receive this email, you’re ok. An Email! I’m not making this up, check google. Just let that lest point sink in… All of this is such a shame. Sage has the ability to be a great place to work, it used to be. Over the years we’ve lost all the good leaders, they’ve all been replaced with journey-men-middle-managers. Managers who have zero people skills. Managers who don’t understand technology, yet are running a technology teams. Managers who are not pulling in the same direction as the top leadership, in- fight and thrive in a blame culture. Middle managers who behaviour like dictators and do only what they want to do irrespective of what their *professional* team think. What a shame!
