My role was replaced by lower cost outsourcers, which is always a risk in a 100% remote role and leaves a sour note, but honestly from a business perspective I totally understand it; QA is usually the first to go. By the time the redundancy came around I was so burnt out that it was actually a bit of a relief.
Blubolt tends to have that standard system of employees you see where lower level employees are cycled out quite often through quitting or redundancies, and the higher level employees stay on for a longer time and there is no middle ground. The only real upward progression I saw was when somebody quit, somebody else took their place, but what can you expect in a small fast paced agency. Looking at the company now on LinkedIn 6 months after my redundancy, it looks like half of the company are new people.
Some of the team do not like each other, and there was some drama there, but nothing bigger than you'd expect in any company of this size; personalities will clash.
Burnout was a massive part of working at blubolt; with the amount of work coming in I know I experienced it, and many other people I talked to felt the same. There was so much work coming in at times that it was unbearable; many of us were working longer hours and getting stressed; sometimes people were so stressed that they were hard to talk to or avoidant and this came up in meetings sometimes where there were near arguments.
Too many meetings. Sometimes half my day was meetings, which is insane to think about now. So many instances where a meeting could just be a slack message or so.
There is a pay disparity among the team. As a QA I was paid more than most developers (which was good for me obviously) but after talking to some developers it is clear that they deserve more. The knowledgebase of the company is basically propped up on a few people with no documentation and these people are not rewarded as much as they should be.
