A small Hungarian company with big visions - Web Developer Ovitas Employee Review

This company avoids bureaucracy – a big plus for ambitious techies with good ideas. It’s a (mostly) flat hierarchy where those who want to take on more challenges and work are encouraged to do so, and when successfully meeting those challenges will rise to more prominent positions. The leadership team is mostly technical (and smart) and can easily be engaged if there are technical or otherwise roadblocks on the horizon that may impact the project you’re working on. In my experience their judgement has always been sound and when needed, they’ve always been able to steer things back on the path towards success. The recent decision by the company to embrace remote and hybrid has been awesome – especially for those of us with longer commutes. It’s been a very fulfilling place to work. And the coffee’s great.

As the company has grown over the past few years, there were times when new hires could have benefitted from having more support.

There are some friendly and helpful people at this company. They were supportive and willing to help me when possible but I did not get to work on their teams.

Meager salaries and resistant to negotiating - My colleague was given a $50k starting salary but I was offered $70k for the same role. I had more professional experience but he had a stronger technical foundation. If this company does appreciate its employees they do not show it through monetary compensation and they are not open to negotiating. Inadequate recruiting and retention. Lack of clarity around job requirements and tech stack. Hostile teammates that neglect to provide relevant documentation and they are too 'busy' to provide clarification. Poor documentation of the software product to begin with. The documentation is very outdated but you'll somehow have to know what is viable information and what is wrong. The training from the partner company is insufferably tedious. You will be walked through 300+ pages of documentation because even though you're qualified as a software engineer its corporate policy to have your hand held. Inadequate internal onboarding and support for new hires when transitioning to teams. Disorganized teams with poor communication and unmanageable team lead. Piecemeal tasks and a lack of transparency around priorities/deadlines making it difficult to manage up and prepare managers for meetings with clients. If it's made clear which clients and which tickets are being discussed and with whom it becomes pretty simple to keep managers updated. Its really disappointing that I had to bring my manager up to speed on a ticket he had never seen before because I happened to see a message he sent at 8:30pm. I understood that he was oblivious; he had a meeting first thing the next morning with the client to discuss the ticket but he neglected to interpret the information until 9pm that night. I was forced to run the test/analysis all over again at the last minute and it gave the impression that I was managing deadlines poorly. He took zero responsibility and made no attempt to advocate for me. This company has an entire repository in Confluence dedicated to their 'Standardization' project. Essentially, it's everything an employee needs to know or have access to in relation to the tech stack and configuring the environment. I was not given access to this documentation until the day before I was let go and I was let go because I 'do not have the skills' for the position even though I was completely abandoned by this company. No one took responsibility for my onboarding and the resources/credentials I needed on day one were not provided until the day before I was let go.