Kaboodle Reviews

Progress is hindered by developers who insist on using dated technologies with little to no consideration for testing. The units tests that have been implemented offer no reassurance for large parts of core functionality that often break. Hotfixes are frequent following releases as careless developers fail to perform the most basic of checks on their work. Feature work often breaks what would usually be considered completely separate functionality and with there being few meaningful tests, this usually goes amiss until pushed live. The core product is a monolith that is too tightly entangled to become anything more than a problematic bottleneck for development. With each new feature, this issue is only enhanced. Senior Developers are unwilling to guide Junior Developers; management insist that this isn't part of their role. This is not ideal for anyone wanting to join in a Junior position with the aim of bettering their skills through learning on the job. Office equipment isn't up to standard. I had to use my own laptop for a few months as the computer provided overheated and crashed whilst developing. There are no repercussions for bad development or lazy developers. Notably, I recall one developer sleeping at their desk on several occasions with no meaningful action taken. Management have been made aware of these issues by at least 6 other team members before leaving. Little, if anything has changed in regard to the bad actors.

There is no ethos behind teaching anyone. Management have said that 'Senior developers aren't there to teach people'. - That being said they've denounced the 'term' senior from some of these developers so they can get away with doing as little as possible such as selling things on eBay. As above there is leniency within the company, so much so that developers are able to fall asleep at their desk without any repercussions. Since my time starting at Kaboodle, 8 people from the development team have left with only 2 new rehires (the development team currently consists of a contractor, 3 seniors and 1 junior), now with no QA team. They believe that the seniors are always right and most of the product knowledge is held currently with a contractor (who built the system). Current senior developers do not listen to code reviews and mark it as a stale review or 'resolved' if they disagree with it, without having a proper conversation about it. Still using old technologies such as JQuery (1.7), and still have products on SVN - upper management seem to be quite averse to Git. Any 'new' technologies seem to be shut down in a quick fashion because the senior developers have no experience with them. The term 'TDD' makes the current development team shake as currently they're all vehemently against testing their work, inevitably hot-fixes are needed on a regular basis and talking amicably with QA's seem almost impossible.