Pros
Tackling technical debt and making progress. Pretty good work-life balance. No pressure to stay late. Good attitude towards taking time off, including sick leave. My team was great. Fully remote.
Cons
Some personality clashes. Mandatory monthly "lab day" where you have to do something different and present to the company the following day. High staff turnover with only one or two engineers being in the company for longer than a couple of years. Legacy codebase initially written by people who didn't know what they were doing. Salary problems for over a year now (late/partial payments, missing pension contributions). Got a letter not long after I left from the pension provider that payments were outstanding and that Novastone would be reported to the Pensions Regulator. In at least one case, a staff member was having to take out loans to pay their rent. No proactive steps taken by management to improve conditions for workers who are having to endure missing money in the middle of a global pandemic. Extremely poor communication, being told mere hours in advance that we might not get paid on time. Such announcements were usually just the CEO trying to tell us how difficult it is for him. Micromanagement from delivery perspective, e.g. obsession with metrics, how the kanban board looks. Just gets in the way. Proud of associations with some clients and partners who I would personally consider to be highly unethical. "WealthTech" is probably making the world a worse place, to be honest. The last thing we need is to make life easier for the rich. You get a laptop but nothing for creating a suitable home office, proper ergonomic office chair/desk etc. Talk of executives taking regular flights. Good news, the climate collapse isn't real after all, I guess.