Checkout.com

Interesting tech stack. Engineering teams are relatively free to choose the tools that they use. Good opportunities for career development. Good, but not market-leading, package overall. Great work-life balance.

• Commercial sells features before they are ready or even built, and promises delivery dates without involving the actual engineers who will build the stuff.
• The London office doesn't have any food in it other than nuts.
• Good senior people have been replaced by external candidates multiple times.
• Executives are seemingly getting more disconnected from employees as the company grows.
• Complete inflexibility about 'flexible' working arrangements; if you can't do the mandated days, then you have to leave.
• Spent 1 year being extremely vague about what the return to the office would look like, and then implemented a company-wide policy that not many people wanted.

Offer more flexibility to staff with regards to working arrangements. The current stance by the company seems to be to ignore all questions about remote working. There were many questions about it at the latest all-employee meeting, which were promised to be 'answered'; however, very few of these were followed up on. To state that productivity has dropped for remote workers without quantifying in any way how that conclusion was made is laughable and somewhat offensive.

People from technology have left and will continue to leave because of the hybrid working policy and the lack of flexibility within it. Some candidates won't consider Checkout due to this policy.

From my point of view, the package offered doesn't offer anything that you can't get elsewhere, so as soon as engineers start looking, they'll find something offering the flexibility they desire.

People have requested remote working arrangements for a variety of reasons, which have so far been pretty much all flat-out refused by People Operations. Letters have been written by People Operations refusing requests, and managers have been forced to sign.

This policy is causing divisions between managers and their reports, as they have to tow the company line on it and can't do anything to support their reports.

I'm interested to see that Checkout has been reviewed as a 'Great Place to Work' after the botched implementation of the hybrid working policy. I believe that Checkout is no longer a 'Great Place to Work' for the reasons I've stated above; however, I believe it could once again become a 'Great Place to Work' if management starts caring about their employees again.