Treat Yourself with something better - Engineer Raymetrics Employee Review

**Chill enviroment and coworkers**: Generally a relaxed enviroment, the team is quite skilled, and they generally are a pleasure to work with. **There is little pressure from management**: Generally management is somewhat absent. This allows you to work at your pace with little stress or pressure (however it has its drawbacks, which I will cover on the Cons section). There are few deadlines for anything. **Ability to learn**: For a developer that has passion to learn new stuff this is a good place to work. Knowledge is shared among the software team, so you can end learning a large variety of tools and frameworks.

**Management is generally absent**: As I mentioned in the Pros section, management is generally absent from the day-to-day operations (especially for software). As a result, they might not recognise your work, or understand its importance. **Poor salary and benefits**: The salaries are not competitive at all, especially for developers on the more junior side, and it is quite difficult to get a raise (there are no performance reviews or anything of that sort). There are no extra benefits at all. Hybrid/Remote work is not considered the default, however you might get a chance if you manage to persuade management. **Disorganization**: As mentioned before, this place can be a mess. There is little long-term planning, and at times some odd decisions have been taken in regards to software. Knowledge and information sharing between teams (and especially between the two offices) is abysmal. This obviously ends up causing problems. **Not set roles**: Even though most people have a role, it is quite likely that you'll end up doing some completely different stuff than you've expected. A front-end developer might have to deploy software or create CI/CD pipelines, and a data analyst might end up writing the backend for an unrelated software themselves. It didn't bother me personally, but if it bothers you, you'll have a difficult time.

- Chill working environment. The people here are generally fun to be around - Always pays on time - Generally open to hiring junior devs - Management typically won't decline any days that you want to take off from work (or even just to work from home) - Hours are pretty stable (~8 hours)

- Upper management is often absent, and the few people in it are completely disorganized. In the 2 years I've been here as of writing this, I could count on one hand how many times I've seen the CEO in the flesh. The COO is also the CTO, the latter being a position he is completely unqualified for. Examples just off the top of my head. - Salaries are not competitive in the slightest, and benefits are non-existent. If you're a junior, you'd be lucky to get a salary that is marginally better than minimum wage. - Basically 0 opportunities for growth if you're not pressuring management. If you want a raise, you can ask nicely, and maybe the CEO will show up within the next year to discuss getting you from 850€/month up to 1000€/month. If you actively threaten to leave, and your boss likes you enough, he'll get the CEO to show up within a week. - Occasionally, there are very blatant displays of sexism from upper management, including comments very inappropriate comments on some women within the company (sometimes shamelessly in front of said women) - No defined roles. Unless you put your foot down against management, you'll probably be shifted to a different role than what you started as. A data scientist might shift towards back end development (and in one specific instance, a data scientist was taken away from that role and ended up working on assembling hardware and possibly even writing firmware for it!). A front end developer might end up doing full stack work. An R&D engineer will shift to a desk job playing customer support half the day. And we all invariably ended up having to do DevOps in some capacity. - Your work will likely be unappreciated and pick up dust in some repository. The COO/CTO is extremely inflexible in terms of how the company's products are built, and will actively steal your code and ideas to pass off as his own, resulting in new software often being shelved and forgotten. He also happened to be the closest thing to a project manager that we in the software team have, but he actively shies away from that role, and only ever assigns tasks that he can't do with ChatGPT. Otherwise it's up to the individual and the most senior dev to brainstorm ideas just to justify keeping your job - The company itself might not have a very bright future. Half the days at the office, I'll occasionally hear about some faulty part that shipped with a LiDAR that turned out to be defective that also happened to cost tens of thousands of euros to replace. At one point, they even shipped a multi-million euro system that had to be returned because it simply didn't work. There is 0 interdepartmental communication outside of a few events here and there, but just from this chatter alone, it makes one wonder how this company is profitable at all, if they can't even do basic QA before shipping big, expensive instruments to clients.