Pros
* People there are quite nice and friendly (at least were around my area). * If you don't want to get into heavy politics, you don't have to. It can actually be quite relaxing if you want it. But if you want to go the hard way, it's also possible. * Technology wise it's getting better, though not yet good, when I was leaving we were trying to catch the world and finally start using stuff others had years before, like AWS or Kafka. Now the discussions were also about other programming languages. Microservies were there already. * A lot of freedom about unimportant matters. * Not so bad salary + a few benefits * Localization in the city centre
Cons
* Lack of freedom about things that make a difference, like quality. It is like it is and we don't have time to do any changes, because we need to develop feature X. Expect of lots of heavy political discussions if you want to change something. * Definitely not a learning company, things are being done as they were done so far. We're making the same mistakes over and over again. * Agility is a joke. Everybody is saying that they're agile, but do we really want to change anything? Not really. And we don't have time for this, because we need to develop feature Y. Forget about having a ScrumMaster, read Anti Agile Manifesto and you have z+. * CTO. Don't remember any his decision or activity, that would be proactive in any way. He's probably only there to do some quick and dirty prototypes for CEO. * CEO quite often operates on a very low, tactical level, down to tinkering with operational parameters for days. I guess he doesn't trust others to do their job. It also means, very rarely ideas are going bottom up, everybody seems to be paralysed and is waiting for CEO to decide. He can also micromanage IT down to specifying DB data model including table and column names. * A lot of mediocre developers, once a feature Z works, we're done, no matter how crappy solution is. We were not looking beyond end of a sprint or a project. * Company culture: it says one thing, but we live a completely different set. We sometimes have a very good ideas, but they never are implemented, or are implemented partially, because we need this feature U right now. * Company wants to be driven by IT, it proudly announces that it is. WHat it doesn't recognize is, that its IT, that is preventing it to thrive. It's quite old, lots of things are ancient and arcane and prevent z+ from changing fast. Projects can last forever for no obvious reasons, but also nobody wants to discuss what has happened and what can be done about it.