UCAS Reviews

Depending on the team you're often expected to work more hours than contracted. You're often expected to give up your lunch breaks to partake in endless soul sapping meetings. Bullying is commonplace in the office and managers don't seem to want or be able to stop it. On more than one occasion a particular senior manager tried to start fights with other colleagues on social outings over minor transgressions. Due to their position and camaraderie with other senior managers nothing was ever done about it. Some managers force methods of working on developers that in the development world is often seen as a personal preference. Test Driven Development (TDD) for example. I was told - in more words - that I would be fired if I didn't follow it 100% of the time by one particularly bossy manager. When I was there senior managers spoke in a weird business abstracted language which made it impossible for non-senior managers to know what on earth they were saying. I believe it was a political control tactic. It made it impossible to get a clear answer out of them. When I was there they had about 8 development teams, all working on different parts of the same system. They ran into the same problem where the sheer number of people added a huge communication overhead to everything - effectively slowing development to a crawl. To this day I still don't understand how they took over 2 years to barely create a working system using so many teams. Some senior developers were very abrasive and hard to work with. One particular individual would often loudly exclaim how suggestions were a foul and rude term, e.g.explicit synonym for poo. When the same tactic was sent his way he would loudly yell - in an open plan office filled with people - that the critiquer should "(explicit synonym for intercourse) off" or similar. On a similar note to abrasive senior developers, most developers and architects were also very hard to work with. The culture of communication in meetings was to talk over people, not listen. In my near two years there I could count on one hand the number of times someone stopped and tried to genuinely understand what the other person was saying.