Rotten to the core - Senior Developer Lab49 Employee Review

Lab49 is probably the worst company I have ever worked for. This review is probably pointless as there is little chance of Lab49 hiring again but just in case enough staff leave that they cannot service their current clients, read on. The worst traits of the company are secrecy, lies. and bullying. The upper management thrive on secrecy and seem to love to hide as much information as possible (mostly for no apparent reason). Any information that does come from management is probably a lie, again normally for no reason. The management is very hierarchical with board level, middle and regional. There are regional leadership teams that operate like the stasi, being instructed to keep the staff “on message” and reporting any deviation from expected (but not communicated) behaviour. Lab49 is losing customers as they treat them as cash cows. Lab49 never considers if they are helping their clients business, improving their systems or doing requested work efficiently. Lab49s main consideration is how to extract as much money as quickly as possible. Totally inappropriate staff are put on projects as they are seen as ambassadors (e.g. client-side JS dev put in server side java role because they are sales oriented rather than assigning a more suitable junior java dev). The deliveries are of very poor quality, are normally very late and over budget. Developers that go the extra mile for clients are publicly reprimanded - that extra work was potentially billable. Lab has lost most of its technical staff. The ones that are left are mostly sales people with a technical background. When the company was busy, they promoted the noisiest people to high levels and allowed them to experiment with whatever they had read in their favourite blogs. The designs were naive and unsuitable - as you would expect from a junior dev put in charge of their first project. Any criticism or suggestions for change was heavily, and normally publicly, squashed. This lead to very frustrated developers giving up and just doing what they were told until they found a proper job. The software finally delivered is of the lowest quality that I have seen in many years in the industry. Lab has found a way of making staff believe that although they are technically superior they will not be able to get a better paid job elsewhere. New comers (and customers) will quickly see the hubris displayed by longer term staff (2 or more years) and wonder how they came to consider themselves to be that good. The staff used to be generally above average but any talent has long gone and what is left is mostly poor. The wages used to be upper quartile but are lagging and are are barely above average now. There is always a better job than Lab49 elsewhere and many with better money too. For those that remain, the “leadership team” members have been promoted well above where they will be able to find work in another company (head of testing in with a team of one person - down from two?). The technical staff left need to find work with good technical leadership before they are totally unemployable. Lab49 attacks the authors of bad Glassdoor reviews by sending the lawyers in. Of course it is toothless but they have threatened withholding pay and taking people to court. They have succeeded in having reviews withdrawn. New staff are "highly encouraged" to quickly add positive reviews and HR staff have added positive reviews when bad reviews are posted. Many of the managers that created this mess have now fled the company. Unfortunately, the managers that are left are the former yes men of the “leadership teams” and are even less competent than their predecessors and are incredibly weak. They are coping by bullying and threatening their already demoralised staff. Lab is now in a predictable bad financial state. They have lost about two thirds of their staff in 2016 to redundancy and attrition. Many of those remaining are ‘on bench’. Bonuses for 2015 were only partly paid in 2016 (25% of awarded bonus) and there are no 2016 / 2017 bonuses, pay rises or promotions. Office space is being sub-let, kitchens not repaired or stocked, company events cancelled or self paid. An office has been opened in India to try to get cheap labour to back up the ‘sales developers’ working on client site but this has flopped with all the Indian staff being on bench for the year or so that they have been employed. The NY and washington offices are clinging onto their oldest clients, essentially just acting as a bodyshop for them. The London office has a fast diminishing client base and is small fraction of its size. Any regional offices have little or no paying work with the majority of staff on bench and hoping to be able to work on projects based in the NY or London office (normally at very unsociable hours). In summary, a bad company that has rotted almost to the point of disappearing. Unless your house is about to be repossessed, find work elsewhere.