Pros
- Some good discounts on cycling brands - Extended lunch breaks (2 hours) to encourage you to exercise once a week (twice a week in winter) - Company bike rides and 'in-person' weeks quarterly, with travel and accommodation paid for if you're not local. These usually include a social of some kind - Remote-first culture - Some genuinely great technical staff - Most of the people working there genuinely love the brand - Great work-life balance. Barely anything happens outside of office hours and the place is usually empty by 5:30 - Monthly free lunch - Often cycling-related freebies knocking about in the office
Cons
- Being a small company that has expanded quickly the development process is kind of all over the place and differs from team to team. It's hard to get your head around, there's a hell of a lot of wasted time and unnecessary meetings - There's next to no QA resource so what little there is ends up being spread super thin across the various teams. The QAs sit outside the product teams so they're very much on the outside looking in. This means certain projects get more attention from QA whilst others are just picked up when they get round to it. They seem to have a hard line between manual and automation QAs as opposed to multi-skilled testers embedded in development teams which is a bit old school. From a dev perspective this means QA is a huge bottleneck - They talk a lot about agile but from what I saw most projects were waterfall with agile ceremonies. Make of that what you will - They work with a lot of agencies as they're too small to attract good talent and can't pay them what they ask for. This results in wildly different developer experiences from team to team. They appear to have fallen into the 'chuck more developers at it and it'll get built faster' trap - Unbalanced notice periods (3 month employee, 1 week employer is common in probation, after which employer increases to 1 month). There's nothing wrong with a 3 month notice period but this should be balanced on both sides, it's unfair to say 'If you want to leave you need to give us 3 months but if we sack you you're only getting 1 month out of us' - No bonus - Attrition is quite high, they lose people regularly (mainly due to compensation/benefits) and can't attract talent to backfill. They appear to be incredibly picky when it comes to talent meaning a lot of rough diamonds fall through the cracks - Some bizarre company policies such as the CTO setting the salaries for all technical staff. My direct line manager didn't know my salary - There isn't really any progression in developer roles. They don't have a defined structure for things so you don't see Seniors, you just see one Lead with about 15 developers at various levels reporting into them - If you're not into cycling there's basically no benefits. There's a pension (which is pretty minimal) but no basics like life assurance, income protection. Even sick pay is only two weeks at full pay, after which it's 2 weeks at half pay. Past that it's unpaid. Worst of all they can't really onboard new benefits because they're now part of Warner Brothers Discovery. They can't do their own thing because WBD won't sign it off and they probably won't get onboarded onto WBD benefits for at least a few years - The offices (while well located for the centre of Bath) are pretty cramped and really poorly laid out. Most of the workforce work remotely so the office itself is usually deserted. Bizarrely there is an expectation during 'in-person' week for everybody to be in the office so during these periods it's incredibly busy and almost impossible to get a desk. The lack of any desk booking system makes it impossible to police - Despite being a cycling media company the bicycle parking at the office and showers were really poor. 2 showers for an office of 100 or so people. They do let you use the facilities at a local hotel but it means waddling 5 minutes down the road in full cycling gear just to have a shower. You also have to go in through reception and ask for a shower pass which is super awkward when you're lycra-clad and surrounded by paying hotel guests - I don't think PSN really know what they want to build. It seems to be part social network, part e-commerce, part cycling Netflix. Their approach to product planning means nothing is ever planned past 3 months which results in it being almost impossible to plan ahead for anything at all. They do the cycling Netflix side of things really well, the rest is a bit cobbled together and chaotic - Bizarre induction which involved doing literally no work for two weeks and just meeting people. This is apparently the same for all employees. I wasn't even allowed to clone a repo