freetobook

1.0

18 Jan 2018

Web developer

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

Dev team have the sort of camaraderie usually only found between prisoners of war.

Cons

1. Management border on psychologically abusive Management's treatment of the IT staff is simply the worst I've ever seen. I don't think it's intentional but working for them is like being in an abusive relationship: they change the requirements constantly and act like you just didn't understand them (gaslighting); they claim they only want the best for you but at the same time undermine you professionally and constantly question your skills and motivations (hot-cold); they threaten to sack people that they suspect are job hunting (controlling behavior/jealousy); they even eavesdrop on developer meetings (paranoia). 2. Favoritism About 3 members of staff are trusted by the management. They are given extended permissions and privileges. They are given better equipment, conference tickets, expenses and pretty much anything reasonable that they ask for. Some favoritism is to be expected everywhere, but this was on the level that the favorite developers received new laptops while a not-favorite developer was stuck with a bottom of the range PC which had been crashing for months. This is, to my mind, absolutely absurd and unacceptable. 3. Micromanaging Unsurprisingly for borderline-abusive senior management with trust issues, they micromanage constantly. None of them are technical people, none of them understand software development, yet they somehow believe it's appropriate for them to sit and watch you code, overrule technical decisions, argue with developers on technical code related logic and behavior etc. etc. 4. "Family Company" The entire management and back-office staff are related to one another, so you simply have nowhere to turn with a complaint about any of the above behavior. If you try to raise issues, they listen sympathetically and then say that they're too old to change. 5. Lack of expertise within the company Their hiring policy for about a decade seems to have been to hire people straight out of university. As a result there is a huge lack of technical expertise within the company. Nobody really seems capable of steering projects or designing the systems they work on. This is not the fault of the developers, they really try their best and are good folks, but they just don't have the direction or the experience to make a good job of it. 6. Atrocious legacy codebase As you can imagine, a system built by fresh grads and overseen by micromanaging non-technical managers is a total disaster area. You will lose your sanity working on it. Overall Do not work for these people. There is not enough money in the world (and they don't have it anyway).

freetobook Response

Thank you, feedback is always welcome. Let's start at the beginning. Context was one of Einstein's great things and it makes sense to put some in here. We have really grown in the last 2 years and that's meant we have many great opportunities to do more for our customers... but we also need more great people. Trying to more than double the size of our tech team has been a challenge, we all know the market for great developers is red hot. We are "family run" Tech business so we're quite direct and occasionally a little blunt, but only because we want to do the best job for our customers... we don't have ego's or agendas here. We also think “trust” is a really big thing, it is always given but more can be earnt, and it can also be lost (i.e. you’d lose trust if you sat down in a Stand Up). All that goes for the whole business, each and every way. A huge part of growth has been down to the trust we have earned from our customers. When you offer the only "freemium model" booking engine in the world you have to work really hard for that trust. But we’ve grown and our passionate customers are also a testament to the quality of development and intuitiveness of the system. Getting that logic perfect has involved (and always will) lots of input from “non-technical people”, people with real “skin in the game”….our clients and our service support colleagues. We are not all “experts” and we can always learn more and do better… which is why we like recruiting the best! That said, the team here have built systems (from the ground up) that have transacted billions of dollars worth of bookings without so much as hiccup. To do that you have to know your stuff. When the biggest names in online bookings want something alpha tested they come to us. When they rank us v’s our competitors, we’re in the top 3 out of over 300 and that’s with our legacy code. All our new colleagues want to work on projects with our guys. Why? because they know their stuff, so the end of point 5 is a little out-of-order. We have definitely taken on some of the advice above, it has been really helpful. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, nobody is only right or only wrong, just very different. PS everyone got brand new laptops, we just trialled it first!

Avoid at all costs - Web Developer freetobook Employee Review

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