The Wild West. Be cautious and enjoy the short-term benefits.
Pros
+ Competitive salary and healthy discretionary bonuses - name your price, as wage bands are pretty much non-existent. + Flexible working hours with an understanding approach to unplanned leave and family-first emergencies. + Qarik also offers good benefits packages, including working from home equipment, medical, etc. + Peer bonus system worth £500 if you're awarded one. + GCP courses that'll pay out £500-£1,000 upon successful completion. + Spare no expense. Reimburse everything from a coffee, office equipment, or a business trip to the US/Belfast. + Realistic interview process. Little-to-no technical assessment as engineers have a realistic outlook on how day-to-day development works. + Some fantastic engineers on the ground who are willing to go the extra mile to help you progress in your engingeering career.
Cons
- Take into context that I am part of a project team that has recently been made redundant. However, I have aimed to be constructive and fair rather than emotional and bitter. Everything below is within my experience in Qarik. - Take your contract's employment status with a fist of salt - you are a glorified contractor. You will get the short-term benefits of being employed full-time, but this is not a people-first company. Entire projects and teams have been binned year after year with little effort or foresight to transition their employees to other things internally. Short-term gains guised as business decisions will be made at the cost of it's employees. - Too much politics, verbal agreements, handshakes and hear-say. Get everything in writing or better yet, have assurances written into your contract. Upper management office, customer engagement team and others will promise you a lot of different things with no guarantee as to when, how or if they're happening. - Consultancy firm struggle to consult clients. Due to this, the client is overly empowered to direct the majority of crucial decisions during sprint and have leverage in negotiating future work. Completed the analysis to determine a piece of work will take eight months? Okay, we'll do it in five. Overpromise. Overpromise. Overpromise. The latest boat-load of redundancies came as a result of an 'over-night' change of heart from the client, after everything was supposedly fine to continue with several month's worth of work just a few days earlier. - Qarik will choose to bin an entire team of employees - business analysists, project managers, customer teams, UX developers, UI engineers, back-end engineers and test engineers when times are hard. They'll spew the usual company excuses to you as to why things didn't work out. Within a few months, they'll hire a recruiter to help build out a new team to undertake their latest project and the cycle repeats again. - Everything thus far has been engineer-centric. A word of warning to new recruits in middle-management. Qarik will advertise jobs that should not exist in the first place. The advert is a result of trying to paper up cracks within a project, when instead all that is needed is some elbow grease to steer in the project in the right direction by those already involved. Within months you'll may be told your skill-set is no longer needed. This has happened to multiple employees within the last 6-8 months. - Severe lack of transparency, balance and respect to employees within projects. You may be part of a engineering team that delivers sprint-on-sprint, but the most crucial decisions are always taken out of your hands. Despite engineers devlierying to a high standard regularly (and being told so), they are the ones who suffer in tough times. Higher-ups who played a hand in things going sour or didn't help avoid it remain within the company. - Engineers have a massive role to play in helping with improving project management. You'll strive to improve processes and provide feedback to upper management just in order to keep the wheels turning. Save yourself the hassle. Pick up your ticket, work on it, close it and move onto the next one and collaborate with your engineering team. If you do want to go above your role, don't 'be seen to be doing the job you want to get'. Instead, renegotiate your role first instead of working on a hand-shake. Tomorrow is not promised in Qarik. - Additionally, the writing will be on the wall for weeks/months ahead of bad news. You'll be told everything is fine despite seeing people dropping like flies, office leases not being renewed, and various 'cost-saving' analysis being undertaken without any transparency. Don't be fooled as the next fully paid staff dinner and drinks invite is just around the corner for those not considered in the 'cost-saving'. - Finally, those facing redundancy were treated like we were all in the same boat. This is not the case. To my knowledge, two redundancy candidates had meetings with the CTO in the time that 'no decisions had been made'. I was met with the usual legalise i.e skills matrix, redundancy pool, etc. Each redundancy candidate had a consultancy which consisted of HR reading a scripted set of T+Cs regarding what you faced as a result of redundancy. This was not a meeting to discuss your skills, known or not known to the company, in the case that you may be offered suitable alternative roles. Therefore it is my opinion, and only my opinion, that the meetings that took place were to the advantage of those employees - solidified by the fact that they were 2 of the 3 employees kept on.