Pros
None whatsoever beyond being a baseline functional employer. Has a large and competently-maintained building on Farringdon Street which is at least a pretty good area of London to be in if they force the staff back into office-based working.
Cons
LN is a publishing company with a website glued on, not a web company in any modern way. It has an enormous millstone around its neck in the form of a mass of appalling old legacy systems that are tangled together like ivy and brambles in a garden that's been left unattended for 20 years. During the first 2 years of my employment a large chunk of the workforce was just dedicated to getting the monolith off a creaking mainframe. I was lucky to work on the one team that was given relatively free rein to reimplement a site but that was in the minority. Most developers there are stuck on products where they can only make changes at the most wearyingly slow pace imaginable due to legacy systems. It's also mandatory to support IE11 in your code due to some dinosaur corporate clients and spineless leadership that can't put its foot down and say no. The sheer amount of developer time that has to be wasted on this is incredible. The company hires developers on the basis of being good at code and then just assigns them to whatever. I did a technical interview on a front end basis with a JS code test but after getting the job was made to spend a year crunching log files with Python. New hires are frequently fresh out of code school and last for about a year before realising their soul is on the verge of being irretrievably crushed, so then leaving. The company insists that all teams and devs must be cross-functional but has no understanding of front end whatsoever. Vast amounts of time are spent forcing devs to learn things about pipelines and containers or unit testing in C#, but no importance is assigned to front end tech, where the expectation is that the devs can just read the docs or take tutorials on their own motivation, and "teach each other". As a result the FE skill level is exceptionally weak, with nobody looking past a 2017-style React/Jest/Sass/webpack stack because that's what's there and it's all they know, usually not very well. The developer parts of the company Slack are a total dead zone. While I was there I was literally the only person sharing knowledge - other developers had zero interest in creating a collegial environment. There is no understanding that specialisms can exist and as a result everyone is mediocre; "Jack of all trades, master of none" is an unknown aphorism. Technology choices for the org largely come in two flavours: 1) imposed by someone in senior leadership because they've heard it's cool - for example, when everyone was forced to take classes in F# and use it for some things. That lasted a few months, was forgotten about, and the last vestiges removed without fanfare a year and a half later; 2) imposed by someone on the other side of the Atlantic. The UK operation had spent a long time fighting for its independence from an even more dated technical outlook on the US side when I arrived, but just before I left orders came that all systems built had to use an everything-is-a-nail framework from the US, including a front end built with the most appallingly out of date framework that was completely incompatible with our direction of travel. If you are very, very lucky you might be on the team I was on which has some freedom of choice, due to a manager who actually fights for his reports to be able to have that. This is vanishingly rare at LN. The senior leadership is largely indistinguishable middle-aged white men. Several came and went in one particular high-ranking role while I was there, sometimes leaving after a big management reshuffle meant they got the hump and upped sticks for one of the company's competitors. The most high-level leadership is in LexisNexis the US company, which can arbitrarily dictate anything it wants. Another thing that had happened when I arrived was that a huge, multi-year project to build a replacement for the old monolith, instituted by the leadership, had recently been ditched on orders of the same leadership and everyone was super sore about how much of their life had just been wasted, especially a few long-timers, all of whom left not long after. New big replacements seem to be ordered every couple of years, all of which sound the same. Is it New Lexis? Lexis Advance? Lexis+? Middle management ranged from incompetent to hostile to nonexistent. For the first 6 months of my employment I didn't have a manager at all. The first one I got after that had zero people skills and was only interested in ticking boxes on a rigid system he had for "managing" people. The manager mentioned above came later and was good for running interference with senior leadership but very poor at understanding that developers aren't interchangeable cogs. Also a genuine quote from him: "We're a meritocracy, skill lets us be diverse because it's colour blind. If I had to hire for diversity the only person I could hire would be a disabled black lesbian." YIKES. The company is littered with lifers who do exactly what they know what to do and then go home every day. They will frequently tell you that whatever you're suggesting is "weird" or that things don't need to be changed from the way they are now, which is usally something that they personally created a long time ago. Career progression is a joke. The review process is geared around having to write hot air statements explaining how you personally contributed to high-level corporate goals like "add value to the company" and "promote boundarylessness" (you'll hear that last word a lot) or OKRs like "Improve time to market and speed of innovation product development through best in class devops". Also if you don't fit into the mould of compliant employee who does everything that the senior leadership mandates without question, you can forget about getting a good grade. By contrast, brown-nosers rise through the ranks in a perfect demonstration of the Peter principle. I didn't get a single pay bump in three years, then quit and got a different job and a hugely increased salary. The latter was because the pay at LN absolutely stinks for web developers, by the way, so it's not even like you're suffering through the grinding corporate "culture" for some personal benefit. In summary: if you thought that companies like the one from "Office Space" don't exist any more, get a job at LexisNexis and be proved wrong. I would have quit in disgust after a year if the pandemic hadn't happened and made everything difficult.
