Pros
- People are lovely to work with, open to casual chats as well as work queries - Occasional office meetups in Edinburgh, fully remote otherwise - Can get involved with a lot of different aspects without hitting barriers - Nice laptop - Decent pay
Cons
- Almost every engineer is under massive undue stress being passed down directly from leadership. There's a constant need to do more, go faster and don't worry about breaking things because that's the 'startup mentality'. All it does is slow everyone else down and lead to more problems, for no material gain except more unfinished products to offer to unwitting clients. - Regular touch points with managers are used to keep the peace, rather than share any company updates, career progression, or to air any concerns before they result in an immediate dismissal with zero warning. - Constantly hiring because people are being made 'redundant' only to hire back someone new a few months later. - Suspicious proportion of new hires happen to know someone in leadership, and are placed into teams without anyone in the team being made aware there was even an interview happening. - Regular restructures, leading to confusion over ownership and who to direct questions to. - Retros often turn into group therapy for how to deal with the CEO's whims, rather than leadership actually taking any action to control the company direction. - New engineering teams added to the company but not part of Engineering are left on free-for-all, only interacting with the other teams when something is actively on fire that should have been easily avoided. - Engineers that should be dedicated to infrastructure and developer operations get pulled onto support issues the vast majority of the time. - Everything about the company is scaling except the infrastructure underneath it, with obvious and known-about cracks being thrown under the rug of 'just pay more, it'll go away'. - Shocking HR procedures when you manage to slight the CEO or anyone else in the leadership team, as soon as that conversation starts there is nothing you can do to stop the end result. Goalposts moving and excuses being made are to be expected when there is a grievance raised. - No qualms about waking engineers up in the middle of the night for test failures, known issues, and capacity problems. Again, can all be easily solved if the team dedicated to infra is allowed to do their job. - Mandatory on-call for everyone with no compensation. Rota includes people who are not at all experienced enough to handle active production fires, resulting in your supposed backup days being just another day for the phone to ring on your private time. - Lots of hiding behind 'someone said this' when raising concerns, rather than addressing the cause and working through it constructively. - Penalised on more than one occasion for working across teams, shortly followed by the company encouraging cross-team work. But only when they point at it as an amazing culture thing apparently. - A blameless culture is often used to hide behind people rushing things and actively breaking them.