Compensation and Titles
Software engineers are underpaid relative to market expectations and comparable roles at similar companies. Compensation does not align with the level of responsibility or workload.
Title inflation is common. Some engineers with “senior” titles operate closer to a mid-level standard, which further blurs ownership, expectations, and technical responsibility.
There is no meaningful distinction between front-end, back-end, or mobile roles. Everyone is grouped under the same “software engineer” title, regardless of specialization, which dilutes career progression and accountability.
Engineering Culture and Ways of Working
Engineers are frequently pulled into process-heavy, ineffective workflows. Many of these processes appear designed more to diffuse responsibility than to enable strong technical decision-making or efficient delivery.
Engineers are effectively expected to be “on call” at all times, including for systems outside their area of expertise (for example, back-end engineers being contacted at night due to mobile app issues).
One of the weakest aspects, from an engineering perspective, is how poorly developer time is valued. There are frequent calls, long meetings, and discussions that could have been handled asynchronously.
A recent organizational trend has been an obsession with “documenting everything.” Much of this work feels performative, with little tangible outcome or impact.
At times, it felt as though the number of managers and directors exceeded the number of developers.
Performance Reviews and Career Development
The performance review process occurs every six months and is extremely time-consuming, often taking up to a full week to complete. Despite the effort involved, outcomes rarely reflect actual impact, technical skill, or contribution.
Raises and promotions are frequently denied with limited transparency, typically justified by vague statements such as “the bar is high.” In practice, performance reviews often feel more like a control mechanism than a genuine feedback or growth tool. It is not uncommon for self-assessments marked as “often exceeds expectations” to be downgraded to “needs development” by managers, with that lower rating determining the final outcome.
Employees are encouraged to maintain “personal development plans,” but in practice these often feel performative. For long periods, these plans had little to no impact on day-to-day work or evaluations, until they were later used selectively against individuals.
Management, Leadership
Your experience at Mews depends heavily on the quality of your manager. Over time, I worked under several managers, with very mixed results. The last one was by far the weakest.
The company has historically relied on a small group of highly experienced senior engineers for technical direction and standards. Many of these individuals have left, resulting in a noticeable loss of technical leadership, authority, and long-term vision. In my final year, there was no clear technical figure to look up to or learn from.
There is a strong culture of toxic positivity, combined with a significant amount of internal politics and pettiness among both peers and management.
Product, Design, QA Practices
Design and product decision-making is another weak area. Designers often do not actively use the product they are designing and tend to work in isolation.
When engineering feedback is provided—particularly when a proposal is impractical or disconnected from real-world constraints—it is frequently taken personally rather than constructively, making collaboration unnecessarily difficult.
At one point, the company laid off the entire QA department and replaced it with SDETs (“software developers in test”). In practice, most of the time these roles did not involve writing automated tests or contributing code, but instead focused on producing documentation describing what should be tested.
There was no effective mechanism to ensure those tests were actually implemented or validated. Manual sanity checks largely disappeared and were left to developers themselves. With the departure of QA, a significant amount of product knowledge was lost, and external SDETs often felt more like friction than meaningful support.
Tools, Monitoring, Office Setup
Employees are issued a company laptop that is heavily monitored. Access to most internal resources is restricted to that device, which significantly limits flexibility and creates unnecessary friction in day-to-day work.
The Prague office operates on a hot-desk model. There are no assigned desks; workspaces must be booked in advance.
Work–Life Balance
Work–life balance depends heavily on personal boundaries. I often worked overtime and on weekends, unpaid—not because I was asked to, but because I enjoy my work and wanted to grow.
That said, if work–life balance is important to you—for example, if you have a family or prefer to strictly separate work from personal life—the environment can still work, provided you are firm about being unreachable outside working hours.
Overall Assessment
Overall, this is a fairly typical corporate environment. There are pockets of good and pockets of bad, and much depends on the specific team you join.
If you are considering interviewing at Mews, I strongly recommend asking detailed questions about your future direct manager. As noted above, how positive your experience will be depends heavily not only on them, but also on their manager (usually a director).
