Pros
- Hybrid working 2 days a week in the office. - Office is easy to get to by car. - Free gilet. - Despite everything that follows, there are good people here.
Cons
- The CEO is an absentee landlord and employs his daughter as “General Counsel” which, nepotism aside, is a huge conflict of interest and tells you all you need to know about how the business is run. - The “AI” suffix is an embarrassing attempt to jump on the AI bandwagon and attract a private equity takeover. Not working out too well so far. - Total absence of training and onboarding for new starters. Most people have been with the business their whole working life and recruitment is geared towards bringing in “juniors” from local universities and colleges. Anyone coming in from another organisation at mid-level is expected to get on with things with high expectations and no training. - Job ads are utterly disingenuous, asking for experience with Agile methodologies, Scrum, Kanban etc. But you won’t be using them here. Work comes down the pipe, developers create an estimation of how long it will take, and if they are out by an afternoon then the hammer comes down owing to the micromanaged code review process. Apparently development teams used to work in sprints but owing to the “complexity” of the platform it created problems with releases. What that really means is that the legacy codebase is so creaking and broken that daily releases have to happen just to make sure it keeps standing up. - No professionalised QA to speak of. Product teams are responsible for QA of every single feature release, and with daily releases this means a mad dash at 4pm to get everything signed off. - Hybrid working but zero flexibility. If you are away from your desk for 15 minutes you’d better have a good reason. - Deeply uninspiring office that is housed in a former mortuary (this is not a joke). - Instead of investigating user behaviour and building solutions that can be measured, Product Managers pile up tickets for the feature factory. Output is valued over outcomes here. - A general atmosphere of juvenile and unprofessional conduct that permeates from the top down. - Benefits fall squarely into the “what we can get away with from a legal perspective” range. Pitiful pension contribution with one of the worst providers in the UK. Objective setting and pay reviews don’t happen. Apparently people don’t have objectives because if they exceed them it gives them grounds to ask for a pay rise. Apocryphal? Perhaps, but believable. - “Growing pains” are attributed to the business having a “start-up culture” which is impossible for a product that has been in use for more than 25 years. Get real.