- The office is not an ideal productive development environment. It's a big open office, and it's particularly noisy about 50% of the time. Equipment is style over quality; a number of people use their own mouse and keyboard rather than the provided set. The network is (currently) entirely wifi, and throttled in a way that gives the vast majority of the bandwidth to people making calls. This is at the expense of people trying to work with code/libraries hosted mainly online. The convoluted processes mean it could take a while before you are able to do anything. Plus, if your equipment breaks; it could take weeks to fix / replace. Meanwhile, support and equipment for the top 6 or so people are treated by default at the highest priority, with no expense spared, whilst many developers are using 7 year old laptops.
- There has been a shift in atmospheres over the last couple of years. 2 other people who left have expressed to me that the place is now a “toxic workspace”. That divide seems to be between the worker level and the highest management level. I have witnessed a shift to a more laddish old fashioned atmosphere from some of the executives, and seen worrying approaches to acquiring ISO accreditation, as well as the suggestion of short cuts on projects relating to safety, and a willingness to work with countries and Governments that promote gender inequality.
- There's also little development representation at the highest level. Which means, they do not know what developers do, how they work, or, understand the software sold by the company. Leading to a software company that is not run with many of the standard practices and divisions of work a thriving software company would typically have. A lot of the hats, you would expect teams to have, DBA, SysAdmin, tester, developer are worn by very few people.
- Pay and recognition of value are widely disjointed. Talk to each other about pay, it's very British not to. Having done my research; there are people who earn a significant amount more than those who are in higher technical positions, with more responsibilities and experience. This could be solved simply with pay bands. Within the Chippenham area; they are generally not competitive. More over; they recently trained people not to expect more than 10% of their recognition to come from their quality of work and work output, much to the chagrin of a several people in the course.
- The vast majority of the code and supporting systems are of a considerable age, just barely held together, and won't help your future. There are also a number of single failure points generated through the management of staff, leavers, and various restructures. Little time and resource is given to improving, or at least modernising the older code. In some cases testing / code reviews and other standard practices are forgone entirely. If you are lucky, you will be in the new cutting edge side of the business.
- Work life balance is iffy at best; it varies person to person though. The words crunch mentality have been mentioned, but I wouldn't quite go that far myself. Personally; I have had around 1 holiday a year cancelled, and numerous OOH calls over the years. Almost all of them were things other people; particularly people paid to work out of hours, could deal with. Or, were down to poorly handled things elsewhere in the business. They do generally, if you ask, give the time lost back in lieu.
