Pros
- Fully Remote Working, the only real benefit here. No requirement to go into office. - AI has been incorporated and embraced well here, only plus point that has improved here in terms of development. - The potential is there to be a good place to work, they seem to have everything ready and setup but don't actually apply any of it correctly making the whole thing more frustrating. - Occasional day off for major sporting events which has been a nice touch - The people here are all really nice and friendly in all departments. The culture in terms of that is fantastic. - Quality of the developers you work with here is high and pleasure to work with. No egos and easy to collaborate with if needed. All seem to share mutual views on the processes, constraints and frustrations we have to be able to develop here. - Whilst the pressure is there to get a lot of work done in a short space of time, especially when you're consistently having to help out in other areas in addition to your dev responsibilities. PM's are understanding if some areas won't be done in time etc. Work life balance is good in that part that they will source additional resource, not expect you to work overtime etc.
Cons
- Poor pay, no discussions around it regardless of performance. The whole process is pointless. Yet they make a big deal how important end of year reviews are, pay transparency. When in reality you will never get above the medium and you'll be lucky to get that. The line is very much "No one gets above this at ESG". Why state it as a possibility then, just lies plain and simple. - Number of high quality devs have left in recent times, not too surprised given the workload put on the devs, lack of pay/benefits for the effort and lack of training/upskilling. - Not a fair share of the workload, developers are not just developers, you'll be a part BA, part Test and part app support too all whilst expected to meet tight deadlines like you're solely doing dev related tasks. Then PM's will act surprised if you might not hit them. Despite being asked to help out in every facet of the organisation whilst doing 100% of your own job. The culture is definitely to throw Dev support at anything non technical upper management cannot comprehend, Progression as a result is impossible because you will never be able to meet your end of year targets as you're having to help assist multiple other areas do their jobs too. A lot of tasks that are not a dev responsibility is just constantly put on us unfairly, with no additional compensation for this. - No training or upskilling despite promises that this is a regular thing. Only training is mandatory generic HR fluff like safety in the workplace etc. Nothing technical to help improve skills as a developer. - Upper management will do nothing to address any underlying issues to help developers no matter how much you bring them up and explain why they are bottlenecking processes. Then whinge at you 6 months later why things are taking long, blaming developers. They don't care about anything as long as the features are in, regardless of the standard that they have been developed too. - No reviewing of past sprints, ticket quality is often poor, although improved than it was a couple years back but still not great. Knowledge is not shared effectively. Just makes the development process an absolute chore. Any ticket you pick up you can be guaranteed you need to speak to 2/3 people about it first. Nothing is ever ready to just pick up and go. Yet at the same time no one seems to actually know how anything even works making it more frustrating trying to source down sections from multiple people to figure out what you need to do. - No unified test data that is used throughout, by BA's, Test or Devs. Makes the process a nightmare and dev testing arduous and incredibly time consuming, hard to give context around any issues with no shared understood scenario examples of testing data. Bugs and defects incredibly difficult to re-create. Same for trying to replicate live production incidents.