Lots of talented people stifled by systemic bureaucracy - Senior Software Engineer Trade Me Employee Review

Kia ora, thanks for your review. We monitor all feedback on Glassdoor and have asked our CTO to respond. Firstly, thanks for sharing your experience, and please do share it internally as well through our regular surveys and Q&A. You can also speak to your Head of Engineering or directly to me. I agree that technical debt is frustrating, and that Trade Me has its fair share. On the other hand, I’m more optimistic about our progress. In the past three years we’ve upped the investment in repaying our tech debt, starting with our infrastructure, and going up the stack with our Thinnest Viable Platform, our eventing strategy and a move towards a hybrid monolith and microservices architecture. While these things take time, we’re paying tech debt back faster than we’re accumulating it. With project Koru we’ve also begun a significant replatforming and re-architecture of back-end systems - something that very few businesses ever get to do and which will help us significantly reduce tech debt. I also acknowledge we can keep improving our Developer Experience. Again, I’m pretty optimistic about what we’re doing. For example, we’ve just celebrated the move of our CI/CD pipeline to Gitlab, which reduced mountains of technical debt and a sprawl of systems that had served their purpose but needed to go. DDE is another area that causes frustration and now that the Gitlab migration is behind us and the .Net migration is coming to an end we can shift our focus to DDE. Project Koru means our future looks much, much better because our engineers can get the dev environment up and running in their machines in a couple of hours and build and automate tests in about 30 seconds. This is a completely different league, and I expect more engineers to benefit from it over the next 1-1.5 years. So I’d say it’s a really exciting time to be at Trade Me.