OpenBet Reviews

Pros

Sydney team was full of fun people to work with. Good work culture (PS4 and table tennis in the office). Free fruit, biscuits, etc. Transition from waterfall to agile was painful but things had pretty much settled when I left in 2015. Management and clients were supportive and sufficiently involved in agile processes. Flexible working hours. Typically 7.5 hour days and no weekends (unless there was extra work and you agreed to it – this was paid overtime). Five weeks of annual leave a year.

Cons

Antiquated tech stack (TCL was by and large the main language used). Salary was lacklustre. I've heard both of these have improved since I left but not sure how much.

Pros

Work life balance The management within Australia is/was competent and cared about the employees Fun team to work with Really smart engineers Occasionally interesting problems arise and it's a fun challenge as an engineer to find a solution

Cons

Everything you heard about the tech being legacy is wrong. It's not legacy, it's ancient. You should be a paleontologist to be working with something that ancient. The primary language used is TCL and the database is Informix, enough said. Pay is much lower than what you could earn at competitors. Let's just say you are looking at a 25-30% raise if you switch jobs. The local management within Australia is great, but I can't say the same about the ones at the top of the food chain. The company has been sold thrice in the few years I have been there. Their primary focus is constantly looking for higher bidders instead of focusing on making a sustainable product or rewriting the decades old code. The tech debt is, well let's just say at Chernobyl levels and it's a testament to the engineers that the product is still managing to hold well even though it's dated.

Pros

I joined the company more than 5 years ago and looking back it was a great place to start. Great people, good culture nice benefits and opportunities to work abroad.

Cons

Their technologies are outdated and won't help you find your next job. The direction the company is moving towards looks pretty grim. Loads of buzzwords coming from new senior hires but all I see is loads of old code with not tests, and the first attempt to modernise the company and bring in "products" failed, mostly due to the lack of tests documenting existing functionality. No new customers for a while now as initial costs are too high for most prospective customers.

Pros

- friendly colleagues - good investment in employee training programmes - office in the city area and so easy to commute to/from - management support to grow individual's professional career within the company - opportunity to apply internally to other customer teams around the world and so travel

Cons

- too much social / non-working hours fun activity expectations to cover their inability to provide enough fun opportunities during work hours as a benefit to employees. - no place for innovation since most of the work being done is driven by customers and in most cases they control the 'what' and 'how' something gets engineered. This leaves the developers with less challenging work. - nothing valuable to add to the resume : still using old languages, old architecture, etc - feeling of no valuable work being done as it doesn't add anything new to the resume - bad work from home attitudes

Pros

- friendly colleagues - small teams of mostly good devs - office in nice area - opportunity to write important, high-use code

Cons

- the teams are completely focussed on getting software out the door as soon as possible with little thought to architecture and new technologies - 80% of development is in outdated languages

Pros

- Nice people (most) - Relaxed atmosphere

Cons

- Stuck in 90's technologies and no technology direction - No long term strategy - do whatever you can now to earn a bit of money attitude - Trying to re-invent the wheel (badly). Examples: new web framework based on tcl, attempt to port OO features to tcl with homegrown solutions

Pros

The best thing about the organisation was the people. It may have grown to 2000 people in 23 countries, but it still, on occasion, felt like a startup. Summer in Chiswick Park was always great and there was usually a few people to get beer with.

Cons

After finding out that the new-to-us SG CFO was of the opinion that "We don't invest in IT because it doesn't generate a profit" it all started going downhill and everyone who could leave, did so. Because what is a technology company without IT to drive it. Now it has been dragged back to the 90's complete with an overflow of middle-management.

Pros

- Normal corporate benefits - Normal salaries

Cons

If you are in a place were paying you on time and giving you normal benefits, such as 14 salaries, paid time-off, flexible hours, starts to be considered Pros, then you are in the wrong company. There is a huge lack of responsibility for several technical matters, people holding the pure management positions have no serious experience or skills. In reality, that leads to a place were everybody has an opinion, but nobody takes responsibility. It is a major problem to solve and I do think it can be solved unless people that have key roles are changed/replaced. You cannot have Senior Management with degrees and background in anything else but Software Engineering, just because they come cheaper or because nobody else will come to work for you. You need to step up and take this seriously. The most obvious to an engineer is that Product Managers are more than actual engineers, which does not make sense. Especially, when you lack people to test software or you delay big customer projects.