Oct 7, 2020
Retail inMotion Response
5yHi there,
We’re so sorry you didn’t have a good experience at Retail inMotion. We work extremely hard to ensure all staff enjoy their time here, have ample opportunities, and get the support they need to succeed and do great work.
You’re obviously disappointed with your personal experience at RiM, and we are disappointed also to hear it, but there are also some inaccuracies in your review and we would like to set the record straight.
It’s true that some talented people have left the business this year, but it hasn’t been a normal year. Covid has forced everyone to re-evaluate their situation and priorities. And although we believe that the crisis represents the biggest opportunity for change in the airline industry in 75 years, it’s still not for everyone. As with many businesses throughout this period, we have had to rapidly adjust our outlook and our cost base in response to the pandemic, and in some cases this has meant making the difficult decision to not backfill some positions. Instead, we have invested in technology to help us do more with less and have restructured many of our teams to be more autonomous. We believe that in the long term, this will create a leaner, more agile, and healthier business overall.
RiM is almost 15 years old now. In the airline industry, that means we’re still a young business, but it’s also plenty of time to rack up a large degree of technical debt. That’s why in 2018 we made the decision to completely overhaul Vector, our flagship platform, with a modern cloud based distributed microservice architecture. Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, the works. This is all in an effort to make our technology stack more scalable, maintainable, supportable, and more easily extendable. In the beginning of this project, just a small number of engineers worked on establishing the foundations and base architecture, but over the last six months in particular, the project has gained traction internally. We added two dedicated engineering teams to the new architecture in April of this year, and we added two more teams in September. This trend will continue until the new architecture is fully complete and in production for all customers. We are committed to moving all our engineering teams across to the new architecture and are providing sufficient training and support to ensure it’s a successful transition for all.
Training has been completely revamped in 2020 and we now have dedicated full-time training programmes in place covering distributed architecture; cloud infrastructure; automated deployments; monitoring, alerting and observability; and automated testing. This training is constantly being expanded upon and refined. In addition to this, we have increased our external training budgets this year and have made that available to our teams for use.
Our HR team and managers have improved our onboarding experience, which includes briefings on the company’s history, goals, mission and vision; training and documentation related to the work you’ll be doing; an induction with your team and manager; scheduled meetings with other teams to learn more about them; assistance in setting up your equipment and tooling; and regular check-ins with HR and your manager to ensure you’re fully setup and comfortable in your new role.
Career progression is a hugely important aspect of how we develop and grow our people. Engineers in particular gain valuable experience working at RiM. When they do eventually leave RiM, they’re more experienced, more senior, and more skilled than when they joined. Where possible we promote from within, and prefer that to hiring senior roles externally. It’s part of our career pathways programme and rewards our people for their results.
In terms of alignment, we have made a large effort this year to increase transparency and have chosen to optimise for collaboration. This sometimes means that not everyone appears aligned at the beginning of a discussion, but we have found that better decisions are made from open debate, from listening to all people’s perspectives and opinions first.
Our staff packages and remuneration are reviewed regularly. There has been a pay review for all staff every year for the past four years and each year the majority received an increase. We also regularly assess and re-align remuneration alongside market rates where necessary. Promotions come with associated increases, and we always seek to reward success and great work where possible.
Again, we are very sorry you didn’t have a positive experience at RiM. If you’d like to reach out to us privately and give us more specific feedback we would be happy to talk to you further. People leaving RiM having had this kind of experience is something we want to completely change. Your feedback feeds into our programmes and how we improve. This information may be too late to help you with your experience at RiM, but we hope it will give other people reading this, a more objective viewpoint to help judge for themselves whether a career at RiM is a good choice for them.