Pros
- good salary, at the top of industry standards, at least for my role - a few excellent people to communicate and collaborate with - remote policy, at least on my role
Cons
My experience at this company was one of the most frustrating and demotivating of my career. Anyone who has worked in an actual Agile environment will immediately see the disconnect between what the company claims to be and what is really happening. I figured out within the first three months that something was very wrong. 1) micromanagement and obsession with hours - down to a surreal level. Every sprint is measured in exact hours and minutes. Planning means receiving a list of tickets on the first day and being asked to write down precisely how long each one will take - literally in minutes. No team meeting, no discussion, no breakdown, no value analysis, no story points, no velocity - nothing. Just “look at the tickets and write exact minutes.” It kills any sense of teamwork or real agile planning. This, apart from all the other things, leads to unnecessary pressure and even indirectly comments like “maybe he overestimated this” from non-technical people who don’t understand the work. 2) “Agile” only in marketing. In practice, nothing resembles Agile. Releases happen constantly because everything is “urgent,” “critical,” or must “go out now.” The only agile thing is how quickly priorities change, not how the team works. 3) No real mentoring or support. Juniors are thrown straight into projects with a “figure it out” mentality. Seniors are usually too overloaded or too burned out to help. If you’re looking for guidance or growth, you won’t find it here. 4) Blame culture everywhere. "Any deviation from an estimate requires a written explanation. Repeating it can escalate to higher management." Those are actual instructions of the way of work. Instead of “why did this happen and how do we improve?”, the approach feels like “who do we blame?” Naturally, this pushes people toward padding their estimates or working in fear of being questioned. 5) Daily stand-ups replaced with an Excel-like report. During my time there, the 15–20 minute daily call was removed “to give devs more time” (as if those 20 minutes were the bottleneck). Instead, we had to fill in a daily report about what we would do. It felt more like an attendance form than a team sync. P.S. I’m not suggesting a lot of meetings for the sake of meetings - but meaningful team syncs in an Agile environment are valuable. They help the team coordinate, share knowledge, and avoid everyone working in isolation. 6) Retros are a rarity, not a process. They only happened when there were no “urgent tasks,” meaning they were treated as a luxury, not a core part of the workflow. No opportunity for honest improvement as a team. 7) Tech debt and outdated code everywhere. There’s constant talk about improving the codebase and adopting new technologies, but it rarely happens. I spent most of my time debugging or adding patches to outdated and sometimes deprecated code. Many features were built with quick hacks because “we need it now.” This becomes mentally exhausting very quickly. 8) Everything is measured If you need a 30-minute alignment meeting with someone, you literally have to pre-plan that in your head and reduce your estimates in your sprint accordingly - or else your hours “won’t fit.” You end up doing mental Tetris with your week, trying to squeeze tasks into exact time boxes, instead of focusing on actual development. It feels less like software engineering and more like trying to please a spreadsheet. 9) No real opportunity for growth. Working on constant hotfixes, patching old code, and pushing rushed features leaves zero space for personal development or learning. If you care about becoming a better engineer, this environment will hold you back. You will feel much more like a ticket-making machine than a developer trying to grow. 10) No respect for focus time - constant interruptions. When working in the office, it’s completely normal for people to walk straight up to your desk and pull you into their problem on the spot - no matter what you’re doing. Deep work? Investigating a tricky bug? Developers have zero protection from random interruptions, which destroys productivity and creates constant context-switching. The culture feels controlled, tense, and unforgiving. Between micromanagement, estimations in hours and minutes, lack of mentoring, rarely retros, constant urgency, and outdated code, the day-to-day reality becomes exhausting. It’s hard to stay motivated. All in all, this company was not a healthy environment for me - especially as someone who has experienced what real Agile looks like. Anyone expecting autonomy, trust, collaboration, or a modern engineering culture will likely be disappointed.