Mettle Reviews

- 3 months notice if you decide to leave and most likely you'll have to stay for whole period - you can only work from UK, Natwest is apparently considering to loosen this restriction, but we didn't hear about any updates in that direction for very long time - former female CEO has left, temporary fill became permanent even though originally they've been looking for another replacement, is he the best candidate for role? Only time will tell - pay raises this year were really far off inflation even if you got good review - giving more responsibilities to certain team members and no reward to reflect it, at least it helps CVs once you decide to look for another job - on-calls - it's something that you count on having to do. Part of the engineering is doing only in hours, some have to do out of hours too. - management is hopeless, very reactionary, always promising to do better next time, but yet they don't learn their lesson - career progression is questionable - finally competency matrix is being applied after long time of promising it's rollout and some people got promoted. How many other people will get the same opportunity - we shall see. There seems to be limited number of available spots on higher levels and considering that quite a bit of engineering is senior heavy - I don't think that there is much room for everyone to make the next step. - feels like we're now getting yearly re-orgs and not exactly well executed - be prepared for possible line managers changing every few months - there seems to be burst of interest in certain causes, like climate change, diversity, etc. but it always feel like it fades away over time. - as much as there are smart people, there are also people that I don't understand how they can keep their jobs - remnants of work done by agency in the early days - it still haunts everyone whenever someone has to touch the legacy code as it's not much fun to deal with poor code and decisions

In January they announced massive redundancies citing restructuring. The deciding factor was your performance over the last 3 years. Very good engineers were sacked. Some had only just had children. In meetings with senior management they'd describe how manager X was bad because suddenly that team's performance had dropped - complete rubbish. When I first joined they had a concept known as summer hours. You could have Friday afternoon off provided that you made up the hours during the week. They axed this last year. Similarly, when I first joined it was 100% remote with 2 days per month being the on-paper position. This changed too. Initially they had fun new-school managers that were laid back. They didn't get in the way and allowed you and your team to flourish. Then they began to hire lame old-school managers that rule with a severe overbearing stick and crush any possible individuality in the team. When I joined Mettle it was exemplary as a workplace for a software engineer. The tech was good, the people were smart and nice, and management was awesome. Over only a couple of years it has gone to crap. To be honest, I don't think many software engineers will see this review as Mettle has ceased all hiring of plain-old techies in the UK and is now targeting eastern Europe. They only seem to hire special skills like platform people and security experts in the UK.