Pros
General: Autonomy. Nice brand! Some flexibility. Central location. £10 gym membership. Several company events. Free fruits / coffee / milk / sweets. Very friendly and helpful colleagues. Low expectations and slow paced workplace. Relaxed ambiance, excellent work/life balance. Can work on a variety of interesting projects for diverse clients. Data Science: Good pay. You can experiment a lot. The CEO will keep you by his side and your needs will be accommodated. You will be considered a genius and will handle the most innovative initiatives. Besides your privileged position and your god-like status, your advice will be highly regarded. BA: Helpful and fun team-mates. You will learn a lot in your first 3 months. You can make a lot, a lot of mistakes and everything will be fine. Developer: VC / scrum / some good practices set in place. You will probably join as a senior and you will enjoy the people. Designer: You are appreciated. Cool, imaginative, friendly team. Get to work on beautiful visuals. Your work makes it to the client.
Cons
Based on my opinion and experience, my general feeling is that: Unless you are a data scientist or have been with the company for 3+ years, you are replaceable and nobody really cares about you. A lot of QA processes are set in place to manage the lack of training / talent / care. Promotion is tenure-based and disregards real talent / leadership. The machine learning models are at the Statistics 101 level. Underwhelming quality product, delivery and execution. The performance reward scheme was discontinued. The company has no vision / meaning or drive. The company is not innovative. This is a family company. High employee turnover. Slow! progression. Slow paced. Data Scientist: You might be in heaven but the infrastructure might not support your efforts. Junior data science team, with junior management. No real mentorship or expert advice. BA: I feel that there are no real challenges after the first 3 months and that most tasks are mundane and boring. You might end up with a passive aggressive manager who ignores your development / personal goals. Your work might involve cleaning the poorly written code of people who got promoted. You might feel that you are a robot and that your ideas will seldom / never matter. Probably nobody will care about using your talents for growing the company. There might be no real mentorship / training / development / feedback. There seems to be 0 room for progression. Pay seems to be below average. Dev: You might, potentially, work with faulty processes, poor code, 2-3 year developments that are prioritised but never finished. Designer: There seems to be no real focus on UX. Similarly, there doesn’t seem to be a good data-driven user understanding. You might not be able to impact most processes and your concepts won’t always make it through.
