Pros
- Generally friendly co-workers. - Knowledge sharing lunches. - Free fruit and drinks. - Dining area, foosball table, ping pong table in the office. - Growing business with bright prospects for the future (at least according to execs).
Cons
- Massive shift in company's culture: once trying to be relaxed and fun, turning into corporate, stressed environment under new execs. - Low morale in many teams due to uninspiring work with aging codebase and overall decline in the company's culture. - Priorities change every second day. - Horrible resourcing - people are sent to other projects/teams based on change in priorities (happening ridiculously often), at the time they start to understand and own their new projects, the priorities change yet another time and developers are sent back/to yet another team/project. - Counter-agile, waterfall approach to projects. - Unrealistic deadlines. - Poor work organisation - devs are often unable to focus on any task/project due to support issues arising almost every day and priorities changing every second day. - Unequal treatment of dev teams. - Components shuffled between teams without a knowledge transfer and adequate resourcing. - Pretending to practice the DevOps culture while the reality looks more like an ongoing holy war between dev and support teams. - Poor inter-team communication (sometimes multiple teams are working on the same project without informing each other). - Top-down technology picks without proper research resulting in a choices not suited for the use case. - Massive waste of time and money fighting with the technologies that were chosen wrongly in the first place e.g. fruitless attempts of RabbitMq clustering on a virtualised hardware, flawed usage of AWS CodeDeploy to deploy multiple applications to a single Auto Scaling Group. - Tons of legacy code. - Tackling technical debt in a shallow manner e.g. Continuous Delivery without automated testing, AWS migration by "lift and shift" of legacy components. - Neglecting proper testing more and more. - Development environments in utter mess slowing down the dev work massively. - Overcomplicated and buggy in-house deployment mechanism. - Overall, there is not much development work for developers in many teams. Instead there is an ongoing firefighting of legacy components, fixing broken environments, fighting with deployment mechanism, raising a JIRAs for a support teams (e.g. to get a firewall opened) and discussing the constantly changing priorities. - Lots of people leaving - managers often due to reorganisation after KKR took over, devs more often due to uninspiring day-to-day work. - Ridiculous 3 months of notice period - office full of people with short timer syndrome. - Company does not make any attempts to keep people with skill and knowledge. - Leaving team members are replaced by people with different skill set and functions e.g. QA replaced by a Dev. - Flat teams structure with many people not knowing what they role is really supposed to be. - Shortage of IT staff is masked by outsourcing work to contractors from all over the world (mainly Bangalore). - Sick management structure with clashing responsibilities and political games. - Middle management seems to be only interested in setting and pushing for deadlines. - Execs talk only about numbers which makes employees angry given very average pay raises and no bonus. - Massive gap between what is told by execs about the projects/work and how it looks like from the employee perspective. - Company focuses on false PR instead of trying to solve real problems e.g. putting fake reviews on Glassdoor instead of trying to apply feedback from the real ones. - Noise in the office. - Faulty air conditioning in the office - it is often either too hot or too cold.
