Pros
One of the highest salaries for the area and an annual bonus Lots of additional benefits (Gym membership, company car scheme and mobile phones for managers etc.) On-site canteen and tea ladies that bring you drinks (they don’t want you leaving your desk) Good if you have limited career ambition and just want a well-paying, guaranteed stable job
Cons
I worked for bet365 over 5 years across multiple teams, so it’s fair to say I’ve got the T-shirt. Most of what follows is primarily for the Stoke office. I initially heard much nicer things about the Manchester office, however over the last few years many of the incompetent Stoke managers have since relocated there, or now manage teams at both locations simultaneously, and as a result my former colleagues now tell me things are going south fast and the Manchester office culture is now just as bad. Firstly, as many others have already said, the parking situation is terrible. To have any chance of getting parked you need to be there before 8.00am (and this cut-off time is only getting worse), otherwise you need to pay to park on a council car park, or park in one of the nearby retail parks or housing estates and hope you don’t get a ticket (or spend your lunch break moving your car and then make up the exceeded break time you went over). Either of these then means at least a 20 minute walk to the office. Then between 5 and 6pm everywhere is grid-locked so you won’t get out, and so straight away you’re on at least a 9 hour day (god forbid you put down your headset and leave at 4.55). Management simply don’t care or acknowledge the parking problems, because they have their own priority parking spaces (yet still choose to park in “our” spaces whenever they wish to). Each time I have driven past the Stoke office, even during covid the car park is always full. As others have also suggested on here, it looks like management have taken to writing fake positive reviews, so I would encourage others to take these with a pinch of salt and instead read all the other lower rated reviews, as I can’t say I disagree with any of them. They are constantly trying to put on a big façade at corporate promotion events and pull the curtain over how it really is. Now I know office politics are part of any company, but at bet365 it this is especially horrendous and particularly with the middle-management. Everybody is constantly trying to cover their backsides, denying everything unless it is in writing and looking for any excuse to shove the blame downhill so they can then brown-nose their superiors in an attempt to look good. After 5 years I can safely say, the real problem was just bad management, not the employees (and you wonder why there is such a high staff turnover on lower tier roles…) The company has already gone through its major growth stage in Stoke, so the majority of people are only in the positions they are because of being in the right place at the right time. Unless you are part of one of the newer more niche teams, there is little chance of being promoted unless someone above you leaves, and this rarely happens as these are high salary roles for Stoke. Then you have little cliques of managers and their mates who group up together to form a holy inner ring, impossible to penetrate without lots of “extra favours” (take note ladies) or “oh can you just do me this and stay late to take one for the team”. If like me you have a family, it’s just not feasible to put in the extra unpaid effort required to be considered a good employee. While as usual, upper management are either blissfully unaware, or simply just don’t care as they sit in their ivory towers. Also I'm told working from home options are now only for "priority employees" whatever that is supposed to mean. So it really is a case of just sit down, shut up and do as you’re told. Any suggestions to improve the day-to-day processes just get shut down (i.e “that’s not your role”) or stolen by your superiors and passed off as their own. There are bi-monthly 1-2-1 reviews but these are pointless as they are always rushed and then they will just fob you off with false promises and “business as usual” speeches. For those of you that care about company ethics and responsible gambling, in the words of my former team leader “we must always just do the minimum to remain regulatory safe – every other gambling company is the same”. Lots of the business is also based in Gibraltar and Malta for tax reasons, so take all of that as you will… I haven’t given one star because there are some really good benefits to working here, but over time the money becomes less and less attractive as you have to deal with all of the above every single day (this includes making up time spent on toilet breaks and filling in timesheets saying what you did every minute of each day). There are pass scans on every door (security is very OTT) so they know your exact start/finish times. I could write a lot more but I am sure you get the picture – I haven’t even talked about how badly managed the projects are! Working for another company just 8 months has made me in hindsight realise just how truly toxic the bet365 working environment was. To anyone who wants to work for bet365, good luck to you, don’t let them bully you into the ground. When they start treating you like just a number grit your teeth and if you want to keep your bonus don’t lash out.