The biggest issue is corporate greed. On the software side, Cubic acts similar to a consultancy - they take on projects for customers based on contacts. The issue is that Cubic always tries to do spend as little money as possible in my experience. If there's a shortcut to be taken that will save money or time (even if it will make everyone's lives more difficult, including Cubic's own employees in the future) Cubic would take it. It frustrated me a lot while I was working there because I'd encounter years old spaghetti code that was just about functioning and had bugs in that were too difficult to fix because nobody could make enough sense of the code anymore that management refused to invest the time in refactoring (even when Cubic had ongoing maintenance contracts covering that code). We would just be told to work around it and do the best we could. Cubic tends to pay very low. When I left I got a 30% pay boost for the same role. My manager who I had quite a close relationship with confided in me how difficult it was to hire anyone decent now because Cubic refused to pay the market rates. We had a few bad hires. One who didn't know what he was doing at all, and another who could barely speak English and struggled to communicate effectively with the rest of the team. Likewise in the test (QA) team, they had very low quality hires who didn't know how to do anything and I basically had to hold their hand to test the software changes I had just made. Overall I don't think working for Cubic is worth it. There's no abuse or toxic culture or anything like that. It's just a frustrating company to work for and they don't even pay well to make up for the frustrating work.
