Decent pay if you survive toxic culture
Pros
- They pay on market level - Free lunch (albeit quite limited) and coffee - Good office location - You might get a chance to work with smart people - Hybrid 50/50 home/office work policy
Cons
- Recently hired managers created a toxic environment in engineering. You either have to be their friends or be constantly berated and criticised for everything. Incredible levels of nepotism throughout the whole department. Supported by the performance review system that includes arbitrary metrics, which don't have any real values behind them to measure, and can be used as weapons against "undesirables". - Unless you are lucky enough to get hired to work on secret projects, you'll be stuck with mind-numbing dull job of supporting legacy code and implementing small features ("please make that button red instead of green"). The situation made worse by the fact that, while company has some kind of vision of where they want to be, no senior manager is willing to take full responsibility over the process. Everything gets offloaded unto teams ("shift left" they call it) and the most common response to a raised concern is: "Well, why don't you fix it and come back to us with result". As a result, there is no cohesive approach to solving issues, no practices adopted on company level and teams are working in complete silos developing their own stuff. You can take a look at three different services developed by three different teams and they will use completely different approaches. - While inside engineering project management is fairly modern and agile, it doesn't really matter. Because the work of engineering department is 100% controlled by product. And in product they still exist in the world of waterfall, 100 pages specs and 2 year plans. As much as you want to be agile, in the end of the day you'll be asked to give the exact deadline. Or, what actually happens more often, you'll be given a deadline and now you have to figure out how to reach it, obviously no cutting of features is allowed. - Company insists on having people in the office 50% of the time, yet fails to provide proper working environment. WIFI connection in the office is appalling, to the point where people have to turn off their cameras on calls, just to be able to hear and talk. Wired connection is available at every desk, but only 30% of them actually work. The situation have been like this ever since September 2021 when people were told to return to the office, but nothing is being done to fix it. Except for "expressions of concern" and "gathering of evidence" from managers. - Company likes to position itself as a challenger or sometimes even a disrupter in fintech, but in reality the C-level management is stuck deep in the past in their ideas and vision. "Crypto is a scam" and "4 days workweek is cheating" are just a few of the opinions of the management in this company. Don't be blinded by the fancy talk you might get from the engineers recruiting you, this company is not a modern FinTech, it's an old school financial institution with an engineering department attached at the back.
