bet365 reviews

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 Hence everything is becoming outdated and most of their so called world class technology is based on frameworks from the 90s and 00s.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.

Favouritism, lack of culture, terrible onboarding experience . HR, recruiting agency and management are full of lies, I joined during COVID, and because of this I was promised during the interview process that I would come into the office just 2 times a week, and work 3 days remotely. I was also told I would onboard remotely, they would send me a laptop maybe an external monitor and other gear about a week before joining them. HR confirmed this in an email, and on the phone about 2 weeks beforehand..but 2 days before my first day I get told that I need to come into the office to "meet the team" etc. I said ok, that's alright, at least I get to meet the team, maybe I need to pick up the gear myself from the office. So I do that, but to my surprise the office was pretty much empty ..about 4 people max from my team were in every day, out of 20. Everyone was using desktop PC's, I then get told I need to come into the office every day, and find out everyone else is on a rota and they work remotely for 3 days a week just like I was promised..but apparently they didn't trust me as a new starter to do that? Most seniors didn't come into the office not even for one day, so I never met them, so much for "meeting the team". Then I get told nobody gets laptops in the company..and if I were to work remotely, I need to use my personal PC. I also find out from other "senior" members that usually its just seniors that get this "perk" of working remotely. Also I was told by my recruiter that the work schedule was 8h a day with an hour break, but then I get told by the same "senior" that it's only them who have the 1h break, and the rest of us have only 30 minutes. I also get told in my first week that I need to take a whopping 30% of my holidays in the next 2 months otherwise I would lose them entirely?(orders from upper management)..at this point I was already getting sick of the lies. They work in a very old school way, no SCRUM or AGILE really..they stuck me with the worst type of work that nobody else wanted to do, bugfixes on some very legacy projects. I was told I was hired for my front end skills, I had experience leading a front-end team working with modern JS frameworks , yet most of the work I was doing was .NET MVC..and some occasional css, almost no JS. The codebase is atrocious, at least on the frontend..and whenever I brought up a way of improving the codebase and doing some refactoring, the senior dev would just shut me down and tell me just to add more code on top to fix the issue, there was never any initiative to improve anything. With some exceptions, most of the seniors are too busy, or too uncaring to help you out, and they frequently just ignored your messages. There is absolutely no team spirit, people just have a tendency of working on their tickets..and struggle by themselves, people don't tend to help each other out. Their codebase is very poorly documented, and most of the knowledge lives in people's heads , their projects barely have any documentation and information is siloed to just a few people. The tech they use is very old and outdated..and they have a lot of in house built libraries and systems, that are not documented at all, getting up to speed with them is a nightmare and you just end up poking around to figure things out. They are absolutely paranoid when it comes to security, nothing can be downloaded from the internet not even for development purposes like libraries and packages., code editors etc..They block youtube and other websites on their network, so you can't even watch tutorials to get up to speed with a certain technology if want it. You can't even attach screenshots on their messaging platform, so people can understand what section or page of a website you are talking about, and you are constantly reminded that the conversations are "routinely monitored" whenever you send a message. The office is in a good location close to Arendale, but their kitchen is extremely small considering how large the floors are and how many people could work there. There are also just 4 small rounded tables to have lunch..and there is no break room/area so people could disconnect a bit from their work. There is no culture in the office, people generally are mindless drones who don't even say good morning to eachother when they pass by. This is somewhat different depending on the team, some teams seem to be more social, but mine definitely was not. Just to exemplify how bad things are in their teams, one of the worse things was the "senior" developer who was assigned to get me up to speed and "upskill me" with their internal libraries and projects. He actively avoided me in person and even ignored my messages, often setting his status to "Busy" right after I would message him with a question. I got the feeling he hated the fact that he was stuck helping me, he would just ignore my PR's for weeks and weeks just because he didnt want to deal with me at all. He lacked patience, and was really bad at explaining concepts, and would try get rid of me as fast as possible. The other developers were usually too busy to help me out, so I was always stuck with his "help".. Definitely not the best place to work as a developer, even worse if you are a frontend dev used to a modern tech stack and I can imagine how bad it is if you are a junior, the lack of support and guidance from the "senior" developers is something that you should be mindful of. Of course they don't mention any of this during the interview process, they keep talking about how their custom built libraries are better than what is out there and they are specifically tailored for their needs..but after you have a look at the library code you pretty much have to restrain yourself from not bursting into laughter. Also none of the devs who wrote these custom libraries are still around in the company..they were mostly written by contractors who have long left the company. This pretty much sums up my experience working there, and boy am I glad it is over!