Pros
Teams and individuals are very willing to help each other. We're seeing a gradually improving DevOps culture across Engineering, and into other departments by breaking down silos and enormously increasing collaboration. Key initiatives are in place to close gaps, simplify processes and focus on delivering value to customers. Sometimes we have to intentionally choose a quick win which will temporarily increase technical debt but this is captured and there is a real drive in the teams to pay back this debt, and not to let it accumulate further. The company has just shifted to a new portfolio process for all future work requests, including changes to existing products & projects. This gives us confidence that we are working on items of value. It also enables effective challenge of low value items. Teams are taking more responsibility for their work each sprint, and there is now a strong culture of how "we" can help "you". For example, teams are building into their retrospectives questions such as, "what can we change to make it easier for other teams to do their jobs?" Heads of department are very supportive of improvements to ways of working, which includes providing ring-fenced time for Engineering improvements which enable all of the above to be strengthened. For example: - Head of Engineering & Agile Lead brought in a quarterly cadence which includes activities, supported by the teams, to move responsibility for software releases and quality into the teams (this has, in the main, been well received); - Product Director has recruited dedicated Product Managers/Owners to work with teams to help shape the direction of travel and increase focus on value. - Architecture Lead is providing strong guidance concerning cloud adoption/migration. Agile has been positioned as a set of context-dependent options (without mandate that "you must") with guidance on where to start and what to look for as teams evolve their ways of working. There have been some incredible improvements over the last year, and teams have now generated their own evolving improvement backlogs. I saw another review that complained that our parent company, Edenred, is enforcing PC security standards. This is a good thing as it reduces security risks in a PCI-compliant company. This also protects us, as employees, by minimising the chance that we could introduce malware into the company. Without going into security details here, in a public forum, I can say that the company does have easy to use processes in place to let us perform our jobs even in a (correctly) locked down environment. The Senior Leadership Team actively engages with employees at all levels for feedback. I've seen junior people have conversations with the SLT that have led to real improvements in our ways of working. There is a strong, continuous, desire and push to ensure a good work-life balance. For example, continuing with flexible home/office working, and not mandating a 9-5.30 culture. I read in another review concerns about silos. Week by week I'm seeing the silos evaporate. I've built up (and I'm not the only one) great working relationships across teams covering the full spectrum of BusDevSecOpsHR. Teams across the business are working hard to increase collaboration and simplify how we work. For example, our new Head of IT & Agile Lead have brought in Lean concepts such as waste identification and elimination, and we are now actively working to remove wait states, to shorten feedback loops and enable anyone, regardless of where they are in the business, to get their jobs done faster and safer. Pay and conditions are excellent and comparable to the wider industry. For example, last year our CEO granted us all an extra day of holiday to use this year. The company has also ensured that during the pandemic we've been benefitting from a work from home allowance which has helped. Other minor things also all add up: if you're in the office there's free fruit and chocolate. Across Engineering we have access to Pluralsight Skills for training, and as an example channels of courses for cloud adoption and Agile have been created. Cloud certification is available and paid for by PPS. Training is encouraged, and people are taking advantage of this. Culturally there is a huge, positive, opportunity to work with a truly global workforce as our colleagues are in the UK, Romania, Belgium and other countries.
Cons
It's a job in IT so on occasion there is going to be need for extra hours. However, that's the nature of a career in IT. What's good to see, however, is that efforts are being made via robotic process automation, test automation, timesheet monitoring, etc to minimise disruption.