Waste of time. You will be out of touch with the industry - Anonymous employee Ex Ordo Employee Review

The company has embraced the Remote working culture that came in post COVID well, and by and large uses distributed tools well (Although some meetings are a bit erratic) The concept of what is being worked on is reasonably public (After the C-level's decisions have been made), and knowledge of projects is well distributed across the workforce (Key given its size) Pay is above average for the roles being hired for

The concept of decision making is completely skewed and inverted. Any/all decisions worth their salt are made in an opaque fashion and entirely top-down. I often (As did others), complained that if strong people are being hired (Which we were led to believe), then we should be empowered to make decisions The relative ability of the newer hires (post-COVID), was quite evident. At times it definitely felt like night and day with the cohort who had been there for 5+ years and those who were new. The new cohort often ruffled a lot of feathers by trying to implement new things or generally just change the status quo (A lot of the experienced hands used to just let things slide). Systems that were aging and just left in a stagnant state for years without patch updates or revisions to the software itself are just accepted as the norm. Given the top-down level nature of the company, you'd be expecting lots of cutting-edge ideas or new ways of thinking. But the abstract nature of the engineering team meant that often business decisions and finance were the key weapons in their arsenal, which for a company that doesn't think of itself as a Startup seems antithetical; you aren't a startup but you are....?? Coupled this with the fact that at most other companies you were looking up to the leadership team for belief and confidence, and here all of these aspects were bereft from most of the C-Level. Given the above, one added layer of complexity came in trying to derive the knowledge or nouse to try improve said systems. Using things like Google, or StackOverflow is particularly tricky when working with ancient versions of software. One area the company believed it was revolutionary in was their bespoke deploy system. On the one hand this interface gave non-technical people an easy way to deploy applications and changes to be tested, however the maintenance burden of this became tricky. The code itself was using ancient frameworks, and any attempt to hire people who were experienced in this would be folly as it is completely bespoke to Ex Ordo. This then meant that again, things wouldn't be easy to improve, and as such any argument that time needed to be invested to pay down this technical debt was swept away.

The CEO wants to come across as everyone's friend, and is a bit of a dreamer. The company, on the surface, feels welcoming and open. There is also a good work-life balance, with emphasis on flexible and remote working, and a promotion of the company's social fabric through yearly get togethers and other incentives to make friends within the company. The pay is not too competitive, but relatively OK considering the location of the company, its funding, and its size.

While the CEO is overall well meaning and very personable, but utterly terrified of confrontation and unable to bring any sort of work ethic or discipline to the team, The CTO is similar in nature, smart, personable, and well meaning, but immature in terms of industry best practices, unable to delegate, and incapable of making his team deliver anything other than endless philosophical discussion and documentation about how things might be done, without actually delivering anything. Not too surprising when accounting for the fact that Ex Ordo is his only real-world experience out of university. HR is atrocious. People don't just get made redundant, they are disappeared like political dissidents in an authoritarian 3rd world country. One minute they're there, and the next they're gone, with no explanation, no goodbyes, no follow-up. Any questions related to them are avoided like the company is pretending they never existed. The long and short of it is that Ex Ordo somehow managed to bootstrap a university project into a semi-decent product, in an industry with few competitors. Now the product is ageing and creaking under its own technical debt, competition is stiffer, and the company is reckoning with its immaturity - failing at its attempts to scale up due to a refusal to accept expert advice and let go of the amateurish practices that, somehow, got them this far.