Going places but needs improvement - Anonymous employee Trainline Employee Review

I wasn’t going to write a review on here because most of it has been said already but since Talent Acquisition keep writing fake reviews I figured I should try and balance it out with what’s really going on. If you’ve not read some of the reviews here you’d expect that trainline was at the bleeding edge of continuous delivery/DevOps. Unfortunately that’s very far from the truth. There’s a lot of “massaging the truth” from our CTO in interviews and articles in the tech press - not so much an attempt at polishing a turd but rolling it around it glitter and passing it off as gold. Proper DevOps is only done at the fringes and most of it is bog-standard application support/troubleshooting passing off as DevOps. Continuous delivery is definitely better than it was but there’s no emphasis on testing (or no testing at all). A good indicator of the mentality at trainline is the recent sacking of the QA team. Not because we suddenly got great at testing but for “continuous delivery doesn’t need QA” ideological reasons. Other reviews have mentioned the change in culture. To be honest I don’t think the cultural shift has been that big but there’s been a very slow erosion from “fun start-up” to something more corporate. A good example of this is that one of the dev teams had to take down a Pacman made of post-its from the windows that had been there for years. We all accept that with growth we need to grow-up a little but there’s a difference between a “corporate” environment and taking all the fun out of working somewhere. This distinction is yet to be made. Management are VERY obsessed with numbers. They’re also incredibly secretive – which is fair enough for their secret redundancy plans but there’s no visibility on what’s coming up or what we need to focus on. This means that priorities change *a lot* and it’s hard to plan the next two weeks let alone the next six months. There’s definitely a huge exodus of staff at all levels right now. This means there’s been a lot of out-sourcing of development work to substandard overseas contractors which in itself makes it a more frustrating place to work. I’ve also seen some shameless bullying from managers in other teams which can’t be helping retention. Unless you’re in the much-lauded front-end or mobile teams don’t expect much praise from management. There’s an obsession with creating “brilliant products” which means technical debt is everywhere. There are hard-to-support business-critical applications written in VB6 with no intention of replacing them because they’re not “brilliant products”. All this technical debt means trainline is very, very far from being as agile as they want you to think. In spite of all this I really do like working at trainline. But it feels like the company is trying to do too much at once and staff morale seems to be at the very bottom of the list.