Pros
- Nice building - Many friendly people - Smart engineers, although the best ones have mostly left - I really can't think of many pros!
Cons
Where do I start? (anything I mention below about software engineers generally applies to UX designers too) - Software engineers are considered second class employees, a sales person without university degree or qualification is treated better - The place is overrun by product managers and what they call "Delivery Leads", which are just a glorified business analysts with little understanding of software design, architecture and implementation - Software engineers are seen as disposable. There's more focus on offshoring efforts, teams entirely based in Xi'an. In the software development part of REA formula, the only important and constant parts are delivery leads and product managers, engineers are expected to be cheap labour at best. - Company politics are rife, product managers will get in the way of progress with their endless turf wars. There are too many of them and some have nothing else to do except for booking meetings, flex muscles and interfere with everyone else job. - Software engineering standards have been degrading for quite some time. Most of Xi'an engineers have substandard engineering skills, none of which will make it through the recruitment process of any half-decent software company. - REA keeps promoting those who are willing to work with the offshoring/cheap-labour model. Perhaps those people do give sense of security to the upper management. - Speaking of the upper management, none are from technical/engineering background, this goes to show the type of culture a software engineer can expect at this place. - REA keeps using Agile process as recruitment tool to attract software engineers and this is because REA has nothing else to brag about. - CEO's approval ratings among the IT community are not so well and this is for a good reason - CIO has been begging the employees to positively review the company. He makes no effort to understand the underlaying reasons as to why the company has been receiving such bad reviews. As a result of his push for employees to leave positive reviews, and some of the naive new employees and HR staff buying into his arguments, the company's rating has slightly improved recently. I doubt that this will last though! - I hear that the engineers are underpaid. I personally was not Less important stuff: - Location is only good if you don't have to change train lines - No free carpark - Friday drinks doesn't happen every Friday!