Great potential, ruined by toxic culture - Developer Ultimate Creative Communications Employee Review

The staff are very welcoming when you first start, especially given the limitations if you're not working in the office itself.

The onboarding process took weeks, to the point where some of the initial days my day consisted of having non-stop introduction meetings with staff members I never spoke to again. There certainly was a culture of "if you've been here a long time we like you, if you're new we don't" after the initial onboarding period. A clique-y culture has been mentioned on reviews that pre-dated my time at the company which supposedly were dealt, but my experience was that it was still there; just more subtle, which in a way is worse because it makes you unsure whether the distain you're getting is because of something you said or just the overall culture, when it's more out in the open you can at least dismiss it and move on. The development team were very elitist and if you didn't code in a very precise way then you were considered a substandard developer. Things like constantly using "advanced" terminology unnecessarily; something I've never seen done anywhere else, even at more successful companies/teams. It was like the management in the development side of things were trying really hard to make the development team like what people envisage the developers at Apple or Facebook to be day to day. The review process massively slowed down workload. I can understand having an approval process for deployments/merges of new code; but having to have someone approve 1 line of code change only to reject it because of a minor discrepancy between how they would have done it and how you did (eg their version was inconsequentially more "optimised" code). Ultimately I was let go after the probation period ended; the reasons given in the dismissal meeting included many issues that had never been raised to me prior and could've easily been changed had they been mentioned previously. I have my suspicions that the reason for the dismissal was actually because the company was failing to win bigger contracts at the time and had already reduced one department from 5 to 4 days a week, so they probably let me go in a cost-cutting measure on a "last in, first out" basis. What really irked me, even to this day was the fact that after the call dismissing me my work email and other factors immediately stopped working because they had cancelled them, which meant I was reliant on WhatsApp-ing the team leader to ask for clarifications about very important things like the nature of the notice period (ie whether I was paid for that period, something I needed to know so I could plan accordingly). In Summary, if you're looking to do business with this company or indeed work for them; I would highly recommend only doing so if it's your only other option.

So many exciting projects to work on and every member of the team has time to sit and help you. Real transparency on business needs and goals which was always refreshing and reassuring, meant you always knew where the business was up to. Team days and parties were so great, really focused on bringing the team together rather than all work no play. I personally felt like they gave me so many opportunities to develop my career and always happy to help me progress. Everyone has their own experiences but professionally and personally I always felt supported.

Working remotely full time could sometimes mean you don’t get to see or speak to some members of the team so often if you’re not on a project together you might not speak to another team member for a while. Equipment could probably have done with a little upgrade at times but wouldn’t say it was a major issue.