Pluspunten
- Flexibility & trust. If you need to take care of errands or take a sick day, nobody's going to interrogate you about it. - Fun. Good group of people who all enjoy working together and hanging out together. - Pretty good benefits. The usual tech fare, health care premiums fully covered (at least while I was there), little perks like snacks, coffee, drinks provided, etc. There's a ping pong table at the office.
Minpunten
- Less of a contracting firm and more of a loose gathering of individual contractors. There's a lot of great talent, but employees are just contracted out individually to big telecoms, who have outdated management and project practices. So you're employed with Data Ductus. But you're not really working FOR Data Ductus as much as you are working ON BEHALF of them. These projects are uninteresting, the workloads are often outrageous, and employees don't really get a say on what projects they work on. This leads to a lot of frustration and churn. - Lack of company vision. There doesn't seem to be any objective for Data Ductus other than "acquire more projects with these big telecoms and banks" - No buy-in from leadership. We would propose new projects and initiatives like offering IoT, cloud solutions, etc. Things each of us were actually interested in and had the skills for. And leadership would say "yeah sounds great!" But there'd be no real support or investment from leadership. We weren't allocated extra time for these initiatives. We never hired any salespeople or marketing. So on paper, the answer was "yes" but in reality we never had a real chance to succeed. We did manage to secure one or two prototype projects, which weren't completely successful and didn't net us any income. But then the effort just stopped cold-turkey, and everyone went back to contracted telecom projects. We tried to do something without actually going all in. - Sometimes these telecom-led projects were outrageous in workload, pinging employees on holidays, nights, and weekends. Sometimes we were advised to just shut off our email and chat after work hours. Other times we were encouraged to "go the extra mile for our customers." - Pay is not as competitive compared to the rest of the industry. - Pseudo-flat hierarchy. Sounds nice in theory, as in "everyone's opinions are valued." In reality, you don't have as much freedom as you'd expect, and there's really a lack of decisive leadership. They want to please everyone so they say "yes" to everything, but then nothing really changes.