— The business is led by the customers, and often product design is completely taken over by customers wishes. This is understandable as the business model is: Have a customer pay for development, then resell the product to other companies. The problem with this is that you end up operating as an agency simply reacting to customer demands. Products are constantly delayed by 6 months to a year.
— Dev teams are spread too thin, with 3–4 devs in each with bespoke solutions for each customer. 6 products and each has custom deployments and logic based on the customer
— Business is constantly restructuring and changing ways of working. In 12 months we went between Kanban, Waterfall, Agile, Feature Driven development and ultimately operating more like an agency than a SaaS product company. Any of these approaches would work, but they don't when you operate like an agency
— Sales team (CEO) oversells features without consulting dev teams (such as re-building the entire solution in a different cloud) this is challenging when the teams are already very short on resource creating unrealistic targets and constantly reshuffling of roadmaps
— HR team is spread thin in my 1.5 years I never received details of my healthcare, but you're reminded to declare it on your tax. Constant delays to receive a response or important documents taken care of since there's only 2 people in the HR team and 1 of them is a contractor who is spread thin.
— Misleading hiring practices: We were told the new CTO was permanent, we got behind his vision only to find he was an interim to restructure the business. This was upsetting for many because on his departure the business quickly began tearing down the processes he put in place. On my hiring, I was told they were building a team, and I was one of two hires. Once I joined, I was the only person in the team with no plans of hiring a second.
— The business reduced head count dramatically, with long serving members who contributed massively to their codebase cast out without any acknowledgement, some leaving immediately within 24 hours or place on garden leave. That was tough to watch.
— Toxic “we are a family” positivity culture. Management, however, have conversations about employees which do not align with the positive “vibes” they portray.
— Unable to hold on to talent: Devs join the business and leave within a week or two. This is challenging as it affects project timelines.
— New leaders brought into the business to extend olive branches and introduced a new level of political dynamics. Some are highly experienced and have the right vision, but ultimately are forced to fight resources at all costs.
All in all, my time at i6 was a lesson in how NOT to run a company. I would personally avoid this business at all costs. Since leaving, I'm working in an environment that delivers on its promises, with direction and with better financial reward. It's not worth burning yourself out here.
