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A sad place for software engineers due to a terrible CTO

Backend Developer
Current Employee
Has worked at Revolut for less than 1 year
June 23, 2020
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Decent salary, more or less interesting projects.

Cons

The CTO mostly focuses on form rather than substance. He cares deeply about naming things (how he believes they should be; be ready to become a psychic), but ignores much deeper problems in the development process.

For example, postmortems are written but never discussed. Sometimes, after a heavy outage, the conclusion is "we did everything right; it was just a coincidence," pretty much every second one. Usually, no action other than saying "do good, don't do bad" is taken.

He surrounded himself with a bunch of yes-men in the platform team, which feels more like a pool of developers for personal pet projects rather than a team that should help others.

The only team whose time is valuable is the platform team. They (or even the CTO himself) can introduce breaking changes overnight, and then the rest of the backend will do nothing for a couple of days but fix builds in their projects.

A cherry on top: the whole company uses the same stack of dependencies without proper versioning, often reinventing the wheel.

Be ready to receive, at least once a week, a message in the developers' Slack channel about new, ridiculous changes in the development process that you need to remember to follow, with zero effort to automate things.

The most suffering people from these processes are POs, who can't really plan to deliver features since developers are distracted with BS tasks coming from the platform/CTO on a daily basis.

Public shaming is also a part of the culture. Sometimes, the CTO drags a link to Bitbucket into a public chat to let everyone discuss what is wrong (in his opinion) with that particular piece of code.

Advice to Management

Find a competent CTO.

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