A Procrastinators Paradise. Nobody has the time.
Pros
They'll include a monthly credit for house cleaning or other services as part of your package. The salaries are quite fair. If you like a very lenient manager and want to have a job where you can remain under the radar. This can be positive I guess.
Cons
I got the impression most people at the company love to procrastinate their day away. "We don't have the time for that" is the excuse used for absolutely everything. People at the company would use this as an excuse to live out their personal lives during work hours and almost never deliver on work. No sprint planning. No agile workflow or anything else as a replacement. When I asked why they don't follow a tried and tested method of planning, they said "we don't have the time" No merge requests. (all merging done on the CLI). No unit tests in the pipelines. During the interview they said they have tests, but I found that was not the case after joining. When asked why they don't use merge requests, the reason given is "we don't have the time" and "we're a start up, we don't need that." I found this reason to be bewildering because open source projects globally are managed by a team of 1 person, and merge requests and testing are the established norm. Most of the team is uncontactable during conventional working hours. People struggle to make it to the office by 11:30, the same people leave the office before 3pm. Traffic and "no time" is always the reason to leave early or arrive late. The same people check in to slack at 9pm or 10pm and often expect assistance at these hours. So your personal life is not respected by the colleagues who couldn't prioritise work during more conventional hours. The engineering manager lives in Egypt, and therefore has Egyptian weekends which on Friday and Saturday. This means that when there is no manager at work on Fridays, nobody else in South Africa does any work on a Friday and most people are uncontactable. Deadlines were not met for 4 months in a row. Which is not surprising given the lenient leadership, and the forgiving attitude to the reason "we don't have the time." Another huge topic on it's own but: HR will treat everything as a valid and serious complaint. So if someone complains that you corrected their english. HR will perform a formal investigation for such a trivial matter. HR allowed a female colleague to bring her husband to work with her everyday. They also interviewed her husband to work at the company. This particular colleague had a pattern of working at the same company as her husband for more then 3 years in a row, and took drastic measures to try and ensure the company would hire her husband.
