Rollercoaster, but in the best possible way
Pros
Friendly, intelligent, passionate colleagues. I take issue with the reviewer who labelled everyone here "average". There is a wealth of talent here ranging from young, raw talent to seasoned, no nonsense veterans. Relaxed and improving working environment. I can only speak about the London office but the facilities (table tennis table, game consoles), equipment (Macbooks, thunderbolt displays) and provisions (free snacks, refreshments, beer etc) all contribute to a relaxed atmosphere. People who are complaining that this is just standard fodder should take a step back and reevaluate such first world problems. Lots of interesting technology to work with. We've taken a risk with our tech stack but it's something that looks like it will pay dividends. Yes, there's always pain when going with something new and relatively untried and we've taken a lot of flak for that in earlier reviews here. I bet those same people would have complained if we went with tried and tested Java, Oracle, Redhat stack. We've also managed to hire some great people directly *because* of the technology we've chosen so just for that I'd rate it a win. Work is chaotic at times but there's never a dull moment. We're never going to be perfect and at this early stage in the company's life we're going to get more things wrong than the more established companies but we're always learning and improving. Things are miles better than they were a year ago and this time next year they'll be much improved again. Bottom line is that the work has been very interesting and rewarding up until this point; there have been ups and downs but definitely far more ups than downs and hopefully many more ups to look forward to in the future. We know we're not perfect and we're always looking to improve. To put this into perspective this is a 3 year old company so of course there's rough edges. What encourages me the most is that we know there are things to improve and we're actively trying to address those things.
Cons
Communication. We're still learning how to communicate effectively within the organisation. IMO many of the critics on this site have suffered directly or indirectly from our poor communication skills internally. This has manifested itself most acutely in information regarding the new platform. Many of the decisions about the new platform were made before these people joined and were not shared properly across the engineering team. To compound the problem when people have queried or disagreed with the choices made there seemed (at least to me) to be too much whispering in corners rather than just asking people why things are the way they are. All the developers that I've worked with here are open to talking about anything and everything and by and large will always have a spare moment to talk and share knowledge. If you see something wrong try and fix it. If you don't want to try and fix it but would rather just snipe from the sidelines then please leave and stop drawing a salary. There's nothing wrong with disagreeing, but in that case please try to address the wrongs that you see. Focus. We sometimes get distracted and have a habit of spreading ourselves too thin. We should cut back on the number of things we do in parallel; we can still do everything in the time we have, we should just do them one (or two) at a time.
