Quite a frustrating and demotivating place to work as an experienced engineer as most of the time is spent propping up and duct-taping the shoddy infrastructure, rather than having opportunities to actually build good, robust systems and reduce unnecessary overhead. The organisation is a mess and this is widely reflected in its engineering architecture and culture, with unclear separation of concerns and poor inter-team communication. Maintaining consistency between teams is a struggle, which makes development, testing and operations a nightmare. Everything feels far more complicated than it needs to be: solutions are over-engineered, tightly-coupled dependencies and overlapping responsibilities between teams lead to points of failure, simple changes take months instead of hours/days, and too much human intervention and overhead is required to keep things running. This isn't due to an inherent complexity of the product, its purely down to poor design and management, and makes for a bad experience at the individual level.
This is all largely a hangover due to multiple iterations of contractors and high staff turnover, where the solution seems to be to keep throwing more resources at the issue in the form of bureaucratic bloat and middle-management, rather than attempt to restructure and streamline processes in an efficient way. It's tricky to untangle technical debt at large organisations, and the company has strict regulations they need to adhere to which have inefficiently trickled down into all of their processes, making radical changes particularly difficult for them. The irony is that the integrity of their systems is still quite bad despite these regulatory standards, and they often feel like an excuse to hide behind to avoid making changes. I suspect there are many cases where this kind of bureaucracy actually impedes efforts that would genuinely improve the quality of their products. Currently they can afford to maintain this status quo, and offer some sense of stability, but if the funding shrivels up they will have huge problems.
I joined GEL with the hope of working on some interesting problems and contributing to a positive mission, and really wanted to be part of something special, but personally I wasn't fulfilled enough by the work and quickly felt that I was not able to offer my full potential or be provided with avenues to demonstrate my strengths. Ultimately I can't help but feel that the company could be organised so much more effectively, and more robust systems could be built that can be developed and maintained while consuming far less resources, i.e. time/money/people. Whether this happens from within or without remains to be seen.
All being said, most people I worked with were very friendly, and I wish GEL all the success in its mission.
