A toxic culture, without a doubt my worst experience in employment
Pros
Free breakfast Bacon roll on a Friday. They do deal with technology at scale. There is an impressive pool of knowledge within the company. A lot of cool tech is being utilised.
Cons
Toxic bullying tech-bro atmosphere Entirely white, mostly hetero-male staff. Mostly anti-social. A lot of protectionist attitudes where knowledge won't be shared. You'll be set up to fail several times with tech you aren't familiar with as an initiation to "put you in your place" by the tech bros. Several "accidental managers" who were talented engineers and therefore were promoted into management, but haven't a clue how to manage. Quick to hire, quick to fire attitude. The departments work in silos, where nobody seems to be aware of what the other department is doing, which leads to a lot of work duplication, frustration, and aggressive territorialism. Departments often seem adversarial rather than collaborative. Although there is a lot of knowledge and experience in the company, it is tricky to access this information due to the mentioned protectionist attitudes of people wanting to hoard the knowledge to themselves to protect their job security. They've grown by acquisition so many times that the company is quite disjointed, with various business islands within the organisation that management doesn't seem to understand. These small fiefdoms can be problematic for processes and adds to the siloing/protectionist/adversarial issue. Several proprietary systems where there is one guru inside the organisation that knows about it, and only that guru can fix things. Same issue as above. There was a generally negative atmosphere which felt generally quite adversarial, even in teams, and on projects. A great deal of resentment was in the air. They don't pay nearly as well as the banks in the same town.