Pluspunten
- Colleagues are always willing to spare you their experience if you can find out when they're available. - Plenty of technologies to get your teeth sunk in to. - A plethora of systems, datasets, domains and platforms to gain experience on. - Well stocked kitchens. - Parking on-site.
Minpunten
- Training offered was touted as being worth "over £10k" but consisted of nothing more than links from YouTube videos which were sent once a month by a third-party company. - Teams are either over-sized or under-sized. - The organisation often gets lost fighting fires rather than identifying the source of smoke filling the air. - On-call engineers are often expected to undertake change work on the evenings they are scheduled to be on-call. - If you're not on-call, you're backup on-call due to the lean headcount. - On-call is paid to some as a bonus and for others as a salary (read your contracts). Management try and use this as leverage for not paying an on-call bonus. - Decisions that affect teams do not appear to be made at a local level. (Information about the debts owed to partners and parents can be found on companies house, which helped me to better understand the justification of some actions) - Information and tools that allow technical teams to support clients and systems is isolated by unbreakable policies, locked behind strong gates and only u lockable by a select few after deciphering the correct type of ticket anagram to raise. Requests need to be raised on the day of a scheduled meeting, else they fall into a backlog which falls down an ever-changing one-note or excel file. - Training and On-boarding needs some serious consideration. You can't drop users into serviceNow and Logic Monitor with just a set of training videos and expect them to understand the behemothic database that's been created in error. - Dev-Ops and cloud adoption felt like a phrase only known by a few and these individuals seem to be isolated from technical teams. - The business is focused on selling data capacity. But does little to consider futureproofability or sustainability of the services they're selling. Product owners seem to be trapped in a cycle of looking for highlights in a security patch, rather than focusing on where markets are moving. - Rota's and other critical documents are stored in antiquated excel spreadsheets and can be modified by most peopleas are most core documents. This creates untold levels of mental fatigue and dramatically impairs the teams abilities to be effective. - Teammates hired for the teams by senior management without team leader or team feedback (or aren't hired at all / promises of back-fills)