Porto Editora Reviews

• Some new contracts with new employees are outsourced. This means you will have another company paying your salary, usually at least a week later than most people. Therefore, you will not get most of the benefits of people with a contract directly with Porto Editora: company partnerships and discounts, health insurance, access to some events, the yearly financial bonus they promise, etc • 18 months contract clause on most new, outsourced contracts, where you are forced to hefty pay a fee to Porto Editora if you want to leave, based on the remaining days you have left to complete 18 months • People do not get fired; they leave on their own after a short while • Terrible working conditions: the office is basically an old storage unit, like a typical attic in a person's home. There is no direct sunlight and there are no windows • You cannot leave the office to go outside and catch some fresh air, even for 5 minutes • Everything you do is monitored. The office is an open space, meaning the positioning of all the employee's workstations and monitors are strategically positioned for maximum control by your managers/bosses. Absolutely no privacy is allowed • Pre-historic hardware and software. Do not expect this to be a software house. You will develop on very old monitors (from the early to mid-2000s, using VGA mostly) and insanely old Windows computers which are also very slow and sluggish. As for software, you will use most tools that are from about 20 years ago • You will use what they call at the company "adapted SCRUM", which is SCRUM but without the most important aspects of it: daily meetings, decent sprint planning, etc. This "adaptation" appears to produce very little results compared to using standard SCRUM as most software houses do • There's a person at the office whose job is monitoring and controlling your assigned tasks. This gets annoying really fast, where this person constantly messages you if you do not register your work on an internal platform a day or two afterward. This steals your focus and flows from the work that matters • Insanely strict working schedule. You are treated like a factory worker, where you must arrive always on time. If you do not, you have to "compensate" the minutes you arrived late either at the end of the working day or during lunchtime, even if you are just physically present at the office and doing absolutely nothing productive • No home office of any kind, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, unless the Portuguese government enforces it. Even when it does enforce home office, the company's administration decides who they would send home (typically people with children only). This means that if you do not fit the profile that they want to send home, you are out of luck and forced, in 2021/2022, to work 100% full-office • The company's administration tried to bend the anti-covid rules in 2021 enforced by the Portuguese government (which were of a mandatory home office) and got an insane fine for this breach by the competent Portuguese authorities • The most disappointing Human Resources department: the heads of the department do not care one bit about you; you are just a number to them. If you have health issues/valid concerns, expect them to first ignore you. 0 flexibility of any kind by the HR people • You will meet the worst possible bosses at the software engineering department. Your concerns/problems are not treated with the respect they deserve. Instead, they laugh at you and even insult you. Yelling is not uncommon. Do not expect any kind of sympathy and/or concern for your problems • Working after hours (unpaid) and/or weekends is common. They say the early financial bonus covers your extra time • Very bad work/life balance • Almost no women or different people to interact and exchange new ideas. Most employees are with the company for more than a few years and lack the desire and/or will to learn new technologies and/or innovate. Expect resistance when trying to employ new technologies and or standards by them • In the unfortunate event you are feeling unwell and are unable to work for a couple of hours/days, the company will not pay you that period of time