Pros
weekly fruit basket monthly "pizza" event Bonus from profit share - if you're in the "favoured club" New offices are pleasant, if you can cope with the ultra open plan and irrelevant office conversations
Cons
Recently, there has been a lot of discussion in the media on work place ethos and cultures and the pervasiveness of toxic, bullying management cultures in the contemporary workplace. This is certainly relevant to Sentient Solution. Sentient is a small company with a development team of about 6/8 developers, and is ideal for taking advantage of Agile development methods. This should be an open, highly collaborative, dynamic, progressive, respectful development environment, utilising Agile development Methods. Unfortunately, it is NOT. This can be an unpleasant place to work. The management style is autocratic, oppressive micromanagement, permeating a toxic blame culture, with a distinct lack of HRT (honesty, respect and trust) coming from the leadership. Overall people management skills are poor. The CEO dictates the management ethos and culture in the company. Additionally, technical leadership is weak. The CTO lacks certain relevant technical skills and experience for that role, which means overall there is a lack of coherent technical, or architectural vision, and direction. There is a lack of expertise and understanding in contemporary architectural paradigms, and best contemporary software engineering practices. Contrary to Agile thinking and progressive development processes there is no collaboration, no collective ownership, no real understanding of agile principles and practices, and no appreciation of quality product development practices. Instead, it’s a collection of developer silos, where worked is assigned, standup meetings are reporting sessions, and sprints are schedule squeeze boxes. Staff retention has been an issue with a significant amount of staff churn. In an 18 months period from Oct 2017 to April 2019, 6 developers were hired, and then by end of 2020 all had left, which indicates an underlying problem in the company. Also, there is very little in the way of career prospects or evolving your development skills. But there is a weekly fruit basket - “let them eat cake”, in this case let them eat bananas!!!