Pros: There is free coffee at the office.

Cons: As an engineer: * Total lack of communication from (inexperience) management to more senior engineering members. * Clueless (and busy) management. * Tons of junior engineers that are still learning. * Obsolete systems (old school banking applications written in C#/.NET). * Terrible engineering practices. * They don't attract talent to join the company. * More recently, a very toxic environment with multiple rounds of layoffs.

Pros: - Decent pay, probably because they're struggling to hire and retain staff. - Some teams do have genuinely nice people, although they're probably looking to leave. - Decent breakfast for free. - Tech is at a decent standard, using a lot of the latest stuff, and a lot of stuff is greenfield.

Cons: RTO policy: 3 days in the office mandated. This is tracked on a team level, so you and/or your team manager will have to deal with the consequences if one person in the team brings the percentage down. The leadership team has clearly said, "If you do not like this policy, please leave the company," which speaks volumes about the attitude of leadership towards their employees. Additionally, this is always framed in such a way that if there are further questions about this, expect to pack your bags and leave. This is said to be done to encourage collaboration, but everybody knows it's to enable micromanagement. This is without doubt a reason that attrition is so high. There is free lunch; however, most of the time it just tends to be a box with cold meat and salad. The best option is hard to get as it goes very quickly. Instead of splitting this across floors, for some reason, this is kept on one floor, which forms lots of queues and traffic at lunchtime. Forget about being promoted and decent pay raises. Typically, pay raises are below inflation level, and promotions are quite hard to come by unless you're loved by management, regardless of performance. So-called 'personal goals' are just a way of making employees do more work for the business for free or outside of working hours. Regular changes bring uncertainty and constant change in direction. The leadership cannot decide to stick with one direction. Sometimes, due to these changes, your role may change with additional responsibility without the additional pay or even a more senior tag. Employees are just really treated as pawns. If you care about being treated nicely at work, forget Checkout. You will just be another number on a spreadsheet. Since office days are Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday, if you decide to take annual leave on either of these three days and work on Monday & Friday, expect some questions and challenges from management. It is usually granted (because they're required to by law), but can be questioned.

Pros: 1. The benefits are good. 2. The majority of the people are amazing to work with; you can learn a lot if you are early in your career. 3. Depending on your team, you may have interesting and challenging work. 4. Depending on your manager, you probably have the flexibility to try out new services or tech stacks, given it has a valid use case.

Cons: 1. The leadership team will track your attendance starting from 2024, which is related to the RTO policy they implemented. The CEO explicitly stated in an AEM, "If you don't like RTO, then please find another job." I know of a few people in the company who missed one day in the office and received a verbal warning. 2. Leadership will do whatever they want and whenever they want. An example of this is the 2023 Christmas period when they decided to close down two offices (Berlin and Porto). Some people did receive a reallocation package, but many did not. Those who did were reallocated to different teams. 3. Reorgs are done regularly. During my time at Checkout, I was part of three reorgs. This means that if a team is not fully cut, they most likely will have different priorities, introducing a lot of friction. I know a manager who lost 50% of his team and was then moved to another department and team. 4. Every six months, you will be part of a review cycle. The CEO implemented stack ranking (Amazon style), promoting a toxic company culture. This is because someone in your team must get a 2 (bottom of the rank). When I first joined Checkout.com, this ranking system wasn't in place. This meant that if you were performing at the next promotion level, you would get promoted. Also, if you were lucky to get promoted, rest assured your salary increase wouldn't be the best. If you are planning to join the company, try to negotiate a higher salary from the start, as any subsequent salary increase as part of promotions will be disappointing. 5. Due to the reasons stated above, many people are leaving from various departments. You can expect delays from other teams when you need to work together to get features out. This is also due to the fact that every team is trying to achieve allocated OKRs (which are meant to be super ambitious, as the CEO puts it, but you can already guess what happens if you miss them). 6. The office itself is a bit crowded at times (probably something to do with the RTO 🤷), so finding rooms for in-person meetings can be challenging. You may still end up doing meetings over Zoom, which defeats the purpose of RTO. 7. Customer first is one significant thing the leadership team abides by, and this shows as employee morale and voice are ignored at every step of the way. This is reflected in the Peakon score for the company, which is now not even spoken about as the score is very low.