Pros
Location - Godalming is a lovely town People at the Godalming office were friendly Good place to work if you want to get the words 'financial software experience' on your CV (but be very careful not to over-egg this at future interviews, I certainly had to show technical abilities learned outside Landmark to have any chance)
Cons
In hindsight the first alarm bells should have rung when in my first week I was asked to test web-based software which clearly had components that were more than 20 years old - a far cry from the modern mobile property valuation software I was told I'd be testing at the interview (this discrepancy was acknowledged by management/HR at my exit interview). The work quickly accelerated into collections of widely varying testing tasks, all completely unrelated but yet quite complex in terms of business rules, and in turn testing requirements. Most of the work was manual box-ticking and form-filling; I tried bringing in a few ideas to speed things up, but if like me you want to work with modern languages and test automation frameworks, Landmark is not the right place. Salary was reasonable, benefits for a permanent role poor (no share options or private healthcare, pension pretty basic). Most of the software was written so long ago that no-one knew how it really worked, either because people had forgotten or those who worked on it had left. This unsurprisingly left me in a rather precarious position, being under constant pressure to give confidence in software changes quickly, but never being able to be sure I had tested everything. Unsurprisingly there were some 'incidents', a particularly bad one (fortunately one I didn't work on) led to people being fired for things they couldn't possibly have fully controlled; and from that point everything felt like a witch-hunt, with no-one knowing on whom the next failure would be blamed. The culture in the office quickly became very 'hush-hush', especially when management from the head office visited. The company never really took software testing seriously as a professional area - developers, project managers, business analysts and on some occasions even the office administrator were doing parts of the testing. Given that the first question anyone usually asks when a bug is found in live is 'why wasn't it tested', I felt I'd better jump out before I was pushed. I also anticipated the closure of the Godalming office, and soon enough later this happened - so worked out well for me in the end.
