Pros
The pros are mainly that it is a good atmosphere and a good social environment: * Relaxed seriousness - It is one of the core company values which roughly means that you can be relaxed and have fun when you can, but when it is required of you (such as when meeting clients) you should be really professional. * Friendly and helpful people - People are in general very helpful at Centiro. If you ask someone for help you will normally receive it. * Free and flexible - There are guys dropping in at noon for work and guys who can be abroad for weeks visiting relatives and working at the same time. So it's genuinely flexible and a job that is easy to combine with your social life.
Cons
Cons are mostly related to compensation and career advancement: * Poor compensation - Hard work does not translate to a higher salary. Think average salary increase ends up at 80 euro / month. And the difference between being a high performer and an average performer is a mere 50 euro / month in salary increase. Me and friends' from uni who worked there quit for the same reason - we could invoice more than entire teams in other departments but did not get compensated for that. * Unequal treatment of departments - eCom is a focus area so people working there used to get perks that Logistics did not get (such as particular overtime compensation) for delivering the same product. This favoritism persist but are now instead mostly seen in salary increases (in general working hours are shorter, you invoice less, but get a higher salary increase). * Poor outlook for career development - You mainly have two roles; application specialist and software developer. You learn a lot the first year as an application specialist but then the curve starts to flatten out. After 1 & 1/2 year as an application specialist you have more or less completely stalled. The organization is deliberately designed to be very flat without many different roles, so you really doesn't have a lot of options as to where you should move. The solution has been 'additional responsibility areas' such as 'BID Manager', 'Customer Insight Manager' and such. You are however not given much time to delve into these areas in order for it to contribute in a meaningful way to building your skill-set. * "The high-performer punishment". I do not know how to describe the phenomenon but essentially, the more skilled you are and the better you deliver projects and products towards the customer - the less likely it is that you get to advance. The reason of course being that Centiro does not want to loose its brand and reputation among the customers. * Poor innovation management - Innovation is highly centralised to one team called the 'Venture Team'. This team is controlled by the owner and CEO, and he personally gives a go/no-go on every single project. Your chances of testing your own innovation ideas without approval from the CEO are very slim, since you will not have time nor resources for it.
