Nice company but requires significant education in managing a tech team - Software Developer Bionic Employee Review

* Unfortunately the company suffers from serious negligence when it comes to technology and how to manage a dev team. Some devs are always busy fire fighting and reacting to problems, and no time is taken for post-mortems to prevent those sorts of things happening again. Urgent work is often thrown at the team with very little time given to plan, design properly and spec out a sound technical solution. * Technical debt is completely neglected and shoved under the rug in a massive cover up attempt. Many developers agree that there's increasing business risk as a result of the temporary hacks and patches being applied to the various systems all for the reason that everything has to be released urgently. It's tragic when most of the developers on the team want to do things properly but are seriously constrained by the amount of pressure put onto them by the business. The result is a complete lack of morale and a feeling of guilt that you've written shoddy code that will eventually become a long term business risk to satisfy a group of stake holders who don't understand the implications of the poorly designed code you've just written * Code reviews are a joke, every time an issue is raised in the review process the response is "Yeah we should fix that, but Marketing need this right now!!!". So hack upon hack upon hack is released to production and no one cares enough (or has the time) to go back and fix them. The result is compounded where features then take longer, so more pressure is added and more mess accumulates. The end result is ultimately a death spiral and a loss of competitiveness. Management should understand this before its too late * Depending on which team you work on (there are two dev teams, Product and Tech Dev), the office can be extremely noisy and distracting. Some devs are fortunate, but others have been placed in very distracting locations, with noise, loud pumping music and crowds of people frequently passing them by and resulting in a lack of focus. This is a result of the lack of understanding on the needs of knowledge based workers. Sales staff thrive on this sort of high energy environment, but roles that require more in depth thinking and silence do not. * Very backwards and closed minded when it comes to remote working. Senior management are very much against it and hate the idea of not being able to physically see their employees. Despite struggling to hire, management are extremely hostile to the idea and refuse to even listen to the potential benefits. This is a symptom of a much more disturbing problem whereby developers are not being evaluated on their code and on the quality of the products they're releasing. Instead devs are rewarded for talking the loudest, saying "the right things" in meetings or releasing very fast at the expense of long term maintenance. To reward developers for speed is a short term business strategy and seriously risks long term profitability. * Countless lies in the job descriptions. Free massages at desks don't exist, free vending machine days will happen once a year if you're lucky and there's no quiet areas that are mentioned in the job spec. * 20 days annual leave is way below industry average of 25 days.