Pros
The only positive to working here is the monetary benefits. The strong financial position of the company means they can afford to pay out big annual bonuses to you. People who have been disciplined don’t always receive these, but as long as you keep your head down you can obtain a sizable bonus pay out even if your overall work performance is mediocre. The company also advertises competitive base salaries. Whilst this is true, in recent years I have found that their salaries for developer and technical roles are no longer as strong as they once were relative to the rest of the market. With remote working it is now fairly easy to earn just as much elsewhere. Lots of other benefits for seniors and management such as company car scheme and mobile phones, however what they often don’t tell you is you don’t just get most of these straight away, you need to have been employed for a lengthy period and prove your loyalty before these become available to you.
Cons
I have worked for bet365 for a good number of years, and I can honestly say, I hate this company. I hate it with a passion. I hate the corporate coldness of the office. I hate the sausage fest, all the banter bullying, brown-nosing and micro-managing. Along with all the politics and personal agendas, but most of all, I hate how everybody is just miserable. This really is such a boring and depressing company to work for. So why did I stay for so long? Simply put, until post-covid it was almost impossible to find a better job in terms of compensation. With remote working now here to stay I have never seen so many people resigning so quickly. They have begrudgingly opened up to the idea of hybrid working in order to improve retention as a result, but this is just a band-aid to the underlying issues which stem from the toxic company culture. In general there are 4 groups of people who work here: #1 - Upper Management: these are all your stereotypical boomers who haven’t done any actual work since about 2013. With one eye gawking at the few female employees, and another gawking at your timesheet, these people are all completely out of touch with reality and are only kept in a job by the natural growth of the gambling industry. The top management and CTO are all former project managers, they are not developers, and they all seem to have no clue on the technical direction in which to take the company. Hence everything is becoming outdated and most of their so called world class technology is based on frameworks from the 90s and 00s. #2 - Middle Management: oh my god where do I even start. Half of them have one eye on retirement and spend all day looking at their emails but not replying to them, and the other half are prepubescent brown-nosers who have been promoted too quickly and have no leadership skills what so ever. It is obvious that most of them don’t want to be here, and are frustrated by not being able to get to upper management or finding alternative employment, and so they take it out on their team in the form of passive aggressive behaviour. #3 - The Graduates: I feel so sorry for these guys. Every few months a new group of them join looking all fresh-faced and ready to learn, and within a year they are turned into soulless zombies. Fortunately by this point most of them learn about the bad company reputation and move on to new jobs, however in order to combat this bet365 has adopted a trend of promoting juniors into seniors very quickly. This is exactly what happened to myself, and it was great, until you realise the company technology is so out-dated they are making it difficult for you to get another job elsewhere for the equivalent salary, therefore trapping you here forever until you have built up enough years’ experience that other companies see you as a viable candidate, and then they can replace you with another senior junior. #4 - The Contractors: all I can say is, they are absolute cowboys, the lot of them. Getting paid over 5x the salary of the other devs but doing half as much work because they don’t know how to use the outdated frameworks and need 3 months just to setup their machine. I honestly have no idea why they continue to hire these people, but at least they are setting a glowing example to the other devs of how to behave, magically disappearing at 3.55 each day they are rivalling the team leaders with their leadership skills. So would I recommend bet365? For a graduate it is a viable option, but only for the desperate. I wish I was fully aware of what I was walking into when I signed my life away on the employment contract. With the developer market now booming you can easily get just as good of a job offer elsewhere, with a company that follows modern remote working practices and actually respects its employees, instead of allowing them to be bullied and having to deal with your boss scowling at you every time you stand up and lock your computer.