Pros
- Help with relocation, sponsoring visa if needed, offering a temporary place after your arrival and helping with registration at the local authorities. - Good equipment, offering RAM upgrades, additional monitors and peripherals, nice desks with height adjustment. - Nice, clean and tidy office environment, two coffee machines, one ping pong table and very nice natural lighting with full front and back glass panels, illuminating the entire office during the summer. - Bike scheme, the government/company pays half of the cost of a new bike if you intend on using it to work. - Nice mobility options, there's a bus stop right in front of the office that connects you to the city centre in 7 minutes, a parking lot in front of the office and a bike trail that spans across the city and is 5 min away from the office. - Even though they don't offer any food at the office, you are 5 min walk from the nearest supermarket, 8 min walk from 3 restaurants, including the AIT campus, which offers great food for just 5 euros. - The line managers are very helpful and are ready to assist you with anything that's non technical, like if you have some problem with your house, commuting to work, etc.
Cons
- Projects: Overall, the projects are either non existent, meaning you will come to "work" everyday and there won't be anything to do for a couple of months - yes, months - or when you finally get a project, you will either work on a completely different set of technologies that you were hired for or the project will be something that the client didn't want to work on, so they just hired a third party company to work on the "boring stuff". - No career progression - You join as a developer and leave as a developer, the whole structure is flat, apart from the "Junior Developers", who are just underpaid people from third world countries. - The "line managers" aren't line managers, they are just a bridge between the two managers who go out looking for projects, and the developers who are going to work on these projects. They are not technical, even though they are the ones responsible for choosing who is going to work on what. You have one meeting every two weeks with your line manager to discuss how the project is going, and by that I mean they just want to know if there's any internal conflict or if the deadlines can be met, it usually takes 2 or 3 minutes. - The first developers hired by the company were all based in Riga, Latvia, and they patronised the entire company, they mistreat everybody else who weren't hired by their direct recommendation, creating a lot of internal conflict. This is due to the lack of hierarchy, so whoever "shouts louder" wins. - Don't allow remote work at all. - The projects doesn't have scope - which means that you will work blindly, where the client will ask the line managers for something do be done, the line managers will then pass that on to the developers but as the line managers aren't technical themselves they don't know at all what the requirement is all about, and you as a developer isn't allowed to contact the client directly. - They say they "use" agile but there's nothing of that. The only thing they have is a Jira board and daily meetings. Forget about story points, sprint plannings, PO, etc. - Childish behavior during code reviews, lots of internal conflicts in this regard that usually "escalate" to the line managers, as the team architecture is flat. But as the line managers aren't technical they try so solve the conflict on a behavioural level. There's even one case of a guy who was fired because two other people got together and complained about him not being technical enough, even though nobody else in the rest of the team shared the same view. - Annual leave is low, only 21 days. - During the interview they will judge you by your age in order to give you a salary, older people get offered 45k and up and younger people get offered 30k or even less. Your experience/knowledge doesn't matter. People who where recommended by one of the developers based In Riga, who were there at the beginning of the company, usually are the best paid, going from from 65k and up.