Pros
Some very gifted and personable co-workers
Cons
The engineering team management had never previously worked in such a role and it showed. They were mere tourists in our Amsterdam office. Terrible decisions were made around the staff they hired - leading to numerous problematic characters being tolerated, and a refusal to take serious action to stop them disrupting the work environment for the truly nice members of staff. During my time I experienced outright aggression and violent words towards members of my team, female members of staff suffering sexual abuse, meetings forever elongated by confrontational and argumentative individuals, and entire teams who were finally forced to undergo behaviour training to ensure they treated each other with respect. When I flagged this to HR, I was ignored, and engineering management tried to gaslight me by blaming the nice developers in my team, and claiming it was they who were the problem. They were a mess in terms of organisation. As one of my London colleagues told me, they considered visiting management to have the attitude of a ''Little Mussolini'' and that their function in the office was nothing more than to ''arrive, create chaos, and leave''. One such instance of chaos was reorganising scrum teams a day before a new sprint was due to start, with nobody made aware of what they were supposed to be working on, or the reason for the change. I immediately contacted my department directors to say it was an issue and causing me to resent going to work to endure the toxic and chaotic atmosphere, where on a daily basis I'd be in meetings with other senior members of staff, during which we'd discuss how on earth we could deal with the guilty party's attitude and mismanagement. Many a shoulder was cried on. The feeling was the issues in Amsterdam were being suppressed and kept out of view of management back in London HQ, for self-preservation. Sadly when I contacted my department heads in England, I was fobbed-off by saying it was actually par for the course, and I should just wait and see if things became less chaotic. As a professional who is used to squashing issues faced by my team, I found this an appalling response and indicative of a workplace that didn't take complaints and worker happiness seriously. Eventually the stress and toxicity drove me to the point where I couldn't face going in to work. I had to withdraw from the office and coudn't even bear to read e-mails as it would trigger my anger and anxiety towards how I'd been treated. I'd mentioned my mental health was suffering numerous times, and HR wasn't interested (literally ignored my emails) until it manifested in my absence. To top it all off, while they were promoting themselves on LinkedIn during mental health awareness week as being a compassionate place of work, they stopped paying me and gave me notice that I wasn't wanted. It was a perfectly terrible encapsulation of how tone deaf and removed from reality these people were. I would avoid this place like the plague. I've worked at over a dozen large and well-known brands, and nothing remotely came close to the toxicity and unprofessional experience I had at DAZN. Even the projects and delivery style were terrible. We effectively had huge waterfall projects to work on, and didn't release any software in one of my teams during the 6 months I was working there! It was completely demoralising, especially as the team didn't have full-stack control (something we begged management for the whole time), and so we could never deliver in complete user stories, and we left mocking and stubbing everything. As a Business Analyst it was frustrating having to chop my user stories into pieces just so we could actually deliver partial tickets within a sprint, with no complete slices of functionality being possible. The final nail in the coffin was when members of our London HQ product team came to deliver a presentation on the plans going forward, and multiple times told us that the main focus of the company was something that none of us were allowed to touch in Amsterdam; the 'sexy' part of the business, i.e. the streaming. I remember struggling to muster the energy to even chat with a co-worker immediately afterwards, as all the enthusiasm had been zapped from me. I left the company within two days of that tone deaf meeting. As if that weren't bad enough, shortly after I joined I discovered that the owner of the company contributed millions to Trump's campaign in the US, so by working there or even just paying for a subscription, you're contributing towards hatred and bigotry. Seriously, you can do better.
