Kagool (UK) Reviews

I was at the company for 2.5 years and I was glad to get out when I did. There is a lack of focus at Kagool. They try to do too many things (Data Engineering, Data Analytics, Integration via MuleSoft, Salesforce, SAP, Mixed Reality, etc) but unfortunately they do most of these areas quite poorly. If they would focus on one or two areas I can see this place having great potential, but how it is now it is quite messy. There was a period in early 2021 where I felt very positive about the company and working here, but things sadly took a turn for the worse and as I gained more experience I started to really see and understand all of the problems. In my team there were no code reviews (no matter how much I pushed for them) which led to poor builds by many members of the team that do not follow best practices. There was no use of version control (no matter how much I pushed for it) which shows the immature development methodology Kagool has. I'm surprised with the lack of issues we had without version control, but it's only a matter of time someone will overwrite some production code. There is a lot of cheap outsourcing that, in return, do not produce quality results. Kagool cares much more about hiring cheap developers than spending more and getting developers that can produce well built and properly documented projects. It was very difficult for me to make any positive change amongst my team. I spent much of my time bottom-up pushing them; the team was not moving in the same direction as me. An example of this is pushing for the correct way to unit test. It ended up just me doing it correctly, with the rest of the team not bothering. Why am I the one pushing the team in the correct direction whilst the practice lead/architects remain complacent? There is also a big lack of trust at Kagool. They will monitor your laptop because they do not trust you. You will be valued more for how many days per week you're in the office rather that the work you are producing. The way we are spoken to by the CEO via emails is, frankly, rude. There was once an email asking us why can't he just hire someone cheaper in Malaysia or India if we aren't coming into the office. This comment alone shows that kagool has no focus on the quality of work that gets produced and cares much more about spending less on salaries. It also made me wonder why do I bother even putting in the effort that I do when we receive constant emails moaning about us. I also question why was I even hired since I seem like such a burden to the company? If you are not on a project, you will be made to feel guilty. Your utilisation is displayed in big numbers when logging in to the timesheet portal. This has two main problems: 1) People will exaggerate or drag out how much time they're spending on project work to increase their percentage (they don't want to look like they're really underutilised!) 2) Discourages any internal practice development because internal development is not billable work and would not count towards utilisation. In my team there was 0 practice development. Our practice was not evolving or improving, and there was no drive to push our team to be the best or keep on top of the technology. Kagool needs to understand that it's not just projects that we need to be on, we need to also be improving our practices and we need to be given time and the opportunity to do so. I think Kagool would greatly benefit from a ticket based system to give to benched members of staff to work on. These tickets will cover important internal work that will help drive and make positive changes to the practice they're working in. In terms of projects, you will be made to feel responsible for getting project work. They fail to understand that the lack of billable utilisation is not the employees fault. I remember in my 6 month review the CIO was quite angry at me for not having work to do. He stressed that I must push for work. After this point I then started to push for any work I could get, but it really shows that my time here was spent bottom-up pushing the members of staff in more senior positions, rather than the other way round. Why do we need to log our time for everything we do? If we were treated like adults (like Kagool keeps saying we are) , we'd just have to log our time spent on the billable work, then anything outside of that shouldn't have to be logged. It is incredibly hard getting timesheet codes for bits and pieces of work that aren't billable, yet we get moaned at if we put down "Bench" or "L&D". Thankfully now I'm at a more mature consultancy where we only log billable time and it is a huge improvement. People are put into practice lead positions but do not know how to lead or manage a team. There are instances of this throughout Kagool, but it was especially apparent in my team. It's great to have someone very technical, but you also need someone who can manage and guide the team. There was NO guidance or leadership in my team whatsoever. I didn't have a single one to one catchup with my manager for the 2.5 years here. In fact, for my first 5 months I didn't even know that I had a manager. There were instances where I felt very lost and isolated whilst working here, especially as a fresh graduate. When I left Kagool I received no exit interview. I would have liked to have given my feedback in the hope they would take it on board and improve how my team functions, but I was not given an opportunity to speak. Since being at a different consultancy for 6 months now, it is eye opening seeing the difference in professionalism, trust, and quality of work that is produced elsewhere. My anxiety has greatly reduced and I feel a lot healthier since leaving Kagool. I finally get to feel valued and appreciated again.