Pros: Great people and really competent engineers. The company culture is really friendly, and you will work with a lot of managers who are there to help you to grow.

Cons: The company is migrating legacy tech to a cloud-based solution that's not tested and mature enough. Yet, instead of motivating engineers to solve challenging migration problems with proper compensation, upper management chose to go down the route of cost-cutting and not adjusting employee compensation based on the inflation rate. As a result, senior-level engineers ended up leaving the company to look for better opportunities elsewhere.

Pros: Free cereal. Free fruit (sometimes; quality and availability can vary). Some really talented and friendly people. A very relaxed, light-hearted, and casual atmosphere. Good tech kit and workstations. Free beer Fridays monthly. Good office location right in the city centre.

Cons: Developer pay isn't bad, but it's nowhere near market-leading. They're always "benchmarking," but you will get better elsewhere. More disheartening is the pay relativity between different roles; why be a dev when you can earn more facilitating standups for a living. Corporate cargo cult agile in full swing. Metrics that should be team-internal only are being used to judge teams across engineering. Of course, this leads to teams doing all kinds of crazy things to manipulate the numbers. Teams will just trash tickets to pretend they have a zero-defect backlog. An antiquated team & personal objectives system is heavily linked to bonuses or promotions. This only leads to everyone going for the "under-promise, over-deliver" strategy. There's no incentive to set risky/hard-to-achieve goals if failure means financial hurt; it's much wiser to play safe. This contributes to... Stuff moves at a glacial speed. Whether it's politics, meetings, lack of resources, or just not in the objectives/priorities, things take an age to get done. Everything needs a Jira ticket. If you're looking for a fast-paced environment, this isn't it. Too many contractors are brought in to work on new feature work while existing devs do maintenance and have little to no involvement in what the future looks like. It doesn't matter if you have years of domain experience; contractors will be brought in to rebuild the system you know inside out. Quarterly objectives setting leads to an extremely short-term vision and a constant shift in direction. There is a serious lack of long-term thinking. More and more red tape is being introduced to satisfy an overly-restrictive SOX implementation. You will constantly lose access to the things you need to do the day-to-day job. Welcome to the world of service desk tickets. Senior management are mostly non-existent apart from quarterly Q&A appearances. Q&A questions are answered with so much denial they sound like they're from a communist state. They struggled to even accept that having a gate as a meeting room door meant the room was too noisy. High recent turnover of staff.

Pros: Work-life balance and no big pressure.

Cons: tech stack too old or not the most efficient