Pros
Fully Remote working environment for engineering is definitely a big plus. Pretty open and collaborative environment where your opinions are generally heard and taken on board. Lots of smart people working together in a fairly egoless environment. Most people are approachable and willing to help. Encouraged to build things correctly for scale and consider correct architecture, and technical debt with project delivery requirements. Although a bit late to the party, CI/CD is something that is actively being worked on and should also make a big difference. Takealot also has both a management and individual contributor career progression track, which means you don't need to become a manager to move up in both responsibility or earning potential. Minimum bi-weekly 1on1's with every member is mandated in engineering. Having said that there's a clear career framework and you are in charge of your own destiny at Takealot with management assisting and guiding on how to get there. There's also a more official mentorship program for those that want to mentor others or are looking for a mentor. Teams are given direct responsibility over their domain from development right through to production, which means gigo (or eat your own dog food) principle applies - this is great because you also have the responsibility and power to make the changes and fix things that directly affect you and your team. As a manager you will have a fair amount of autonomy (responsibility with necessary authority) over your area and team and how to go about things - obviously within a loose process and architecture best practice framework. Metrics and data is shared and made available including financial info on how company is doing. Also like the fact that if you are particularly interested in something, no-one will stop you from getting involved and getting like minded individuals together to spit ball and drive it. Team swops are also possible for engineers, especially after contributing in a particular area for a while. Team builds/lunches/suppers are encouraged at least quarterly to every 6 months min. Slack is used extensively within engineering for communication. There are usually quarterly allhands engineering sessions aswell where feedback is giving on high level metrics for incidents, project delivery, sentiment survey feedback, big initiatives coming up etc
Cons
Not many cons to be honest. No place is perfect and sure there are the odd niggles that crop up, and it will vary team to team. Upper Management do send out a Sentiment Survey quarterly to everyone in engineering which encourages people to anonymously give feedback on things that are going well and constructive criticism - and they do go through it. Engineering manager can be very busy with jumping around between high-level and more 'low-level' type work, so there's constant context-switching. Also a fair amount of admin, partly due to not having dedicated scrum masters - but I prefer that but depending others might not. You are master of your own destiny at Takealot and no-one will stop you from getting stuck in, putting forward recommendations and spearheading things you're passionate about (tools, initiatives, process, architecture etc) So you will get out what you put in.