Code Passing - Manager Fathom London Employee Review

Very relaxed atmosphere. Free snacks. Good pay.

Poor management. No idea of the product and service design process. It’s a front-end development house masquerading as a UX consultancy. The management deliberately avoid users assuming they know what the design should be. “Clients come to us for this” I was told. They reject tried and tested design philosophy wanting to always innovate. “It’s the fathom way”. If they could they would stop breathing oxygen to try something contrarian. Constantly producing products that look nice but are not practical or useful to end users is a pattern here. Avoid this place if you want to make useful things. The founders try to micromanage all projects and they don’t listen to the senior people they contract in.

I joined as a contractor working on a huge project together with many other senior devs, we were fully independent and had close to no management, the company really relies on the seniority of its people to make decisions on the product and they leave lot of freedom in taking whatever technical path is better.

The few times i had to interact with the senior management i found them to competent but not the most emphatic people on the market. Also contractors are not treated in the same way of permanent employees in order to push them to join the company permanently.