Sad place for software engineers due to terrible CTO - Backend Developer Revolut Employee Review

1.0
Jun 23, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Decent salary, more or less interesting projects

Cons

CTO mostly focuses on a form rather than substance, he cares deeply about naming things (how HE believes they should be, be ready to become a psychic), but ignores much deeper problems in the development process. For example, postmortems are written, but never discussed, sometimes after a heavy outage the conclusion is "we did everything right, it is just a coincidence", pretty much every second one. Usually no action but saying "do good, don't do bad" is taken. He surrounded himself with a bunch of yes-men platform team, which feels like more a pool of developers for personal pet projects rather than team that should help others. The only team whose time is valuable, is the platform team, they (or even CTO himself) can introduce breaking changes overnight and then the rest of the backend will do nothing for a couple of days but fix builds in their projects. A cherry on top: whole company uses same stack of dependencies without proper versioning, often reinventing the wheel. Be ready to receive at least once a week a message in a developers slack channel about new ridiculous changes in the development process that you need to remember to follow with zero effort to automate things. The most suffering people from these processes are POs who can't really plan to deliver features, since developers are distracted with BS tasks coming from platform/CTO on a daily basis. Public shaming is also a part of the culture, sometimes CTO drags a link to bitbucket into a public chat to let everyone to discuss what is wrong (in his opinion) with this particular piece of code.

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Revolut Response
5y
We’re sorry that your experience sounds negative. We do pride ourselves on having a culture of open feedback, and we think that everyone can gain a lot from group learning sessions, but this is never for shaming purposes. Postmortems are written and openly accessible to all and most of the company uses a similar stack so that we can upgrade once and identify any bugs at the same time. We value our tech teams and developers very highly and value their knowledge and experience. As a very fast moving business, we do sometimes have to work at speed and to manage competing priorities but we do value thinking deeper and properly analysing the root causes of any problem. As a current employee we hope you will be able to raise your concerns with your manager or with HR. Thank you for taking the time to make these comments.

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5.0
Jun 10, 2026
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CEO approval
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Pros

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Cons

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2.0
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Pros

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