Software Engineer • Current Employee
Pros: - Good salary. They also offer a generous bonus at the end of the year, which is rare in this industry.
- Tech stack is very interesting. You're gonna learn a lot of infrastructure as well as AI and data engineering if you end up in a good team.
- People are very smart and in general very motivated. If you enjoy building cool stuff, this is the place to go.
Cons: - No flexibility in their hybrid policy: If you join Checkout, you must come 3 days per week in the office. There are some exceptions, i.e., if you are sick or for extraordinary causes. I really feel this policy hurts more than helps; most of the talent are going to competitors precisely for this reason, and for work/life balance, this is pretty bad.
- Mandatory out-of-hours on-call. It is quite generous (50% of your hourly salary), however, if you are in a team with a lot of incidents (i.e., core teams), get yourself prepared. If you get an offer, make sure it's not a critical team to avoid this.
- Perks are not really perks: they come as a deduction from your salary. For example, private health insurance. You need to sacrifice ~£100/month to get this "perk", as well as others, which I found a bit ridiculous.
- The free lunches are terrible. Sorry, but it is the truth. I would suggest management radically change the free lunches approach and either offer vouchers to employees or a self-service catering like other tech companies do.