Work-Life balance: In short there is no balance of it.
A typical workday here will easily take 11-12 hours. At least for me it was 11am-11pm. Working like this on a daily basis can be harmful for health after a certain point of time.
Management for the automation team has a mindset of keeping the team small. According to them it's easy to maintain that way. There was literally no new recruitment within a period of 9-10 months, reason being no good hire was possible or people leaving right after joining. And at that point of time 3 employees were pulling the amount of tasks which at least would take 6-7 employees to handle in a normal situation. But good news is management was able to hire 3 new people within a period of a month once existing employees started leaving the company.
Also numerous times I was forced by management to work on issue fixing past 11pm of local time. And mostly those issues were ad-hoc in nature and would cause for changes from the client side without any Jira ticket.
Compensation and related discussion: Being a start-up it's quite practical that people here need to work really hard and employees of early stages should be compensated accordingly. But management lacks understanding of current market and ends up paying like (max 2.5-3 times of years of experience in lakhs for India) MNCs which considering the responsibilities and poor work-life balance is not good at all.
In a discussion, a topic was raised for correction of compensation. And here is how management responded.
"If your workload is reduced, compensation will also be reduced. Is that okay for you?"
“If you are still not happy with your compensation, next time you’ll have to discuss this with Bassam (CEO)”
I think here management needs to understand expectations never work one way. If a company is expecting performance and dedication from employees, they also will expect something in return. Excuse of being start-up does not hold after a certain period especially where the company is doing so well (according to internal meetings) even in pandemic.
Automation Developer Role: This role is really exciting unless explained in detail.
Apart from development one also has to work on support, testing, monitoring of execution failures through slack and email notifications. Priorities of tasks change very frequently which can be challenging to estimate the date of deliverables from a development point of view. Mostly to finish development in estimated time one has to work additional hours.
I never understood if these additional responsibilities were missed by recruitment authority or not mentioned intentionally. Changing a job is easy for anyone. People should know what they have to be responsible for once they are onboarded.
Poor Management of Code and Quality: People from management are also involved in automation here and they are very much attached to their own code.
Very basic things like 500+ lines of java methods, missing Javadoc, formatting issues are all over in the base code which not only make things really difficult to understand others code but also causes delays for deliverables.
Code review process is for only half of the team and very frequently there are issues from code which is not reviewed by the team. It's really frustrating to see something breaking because someone from management decided to change something in code without any discussion/code review.
