London Computer Systems reviews about "pay"

Conditions for leveling for developers are at whim, no hard details on improvement metrics, it's entirely on the developers to push for recognition/pay bumps/etc. and they are slow to hand anything out, I'd expect to wait a few years before anything material comes out of efforts.

Not really a con since I am not experienced enough yet,.. but I just hope their pay increases match what is being offered in the open market as I progress in experience, I would stay here for life as long as I am not missing out on any financial opportunities that would help make my life more secure.

- Pay is low compared to other companies in the industry. - Accountability is poor for under performing employees.

Pay could be better. My first couple years here were great, but after that felt kinda lost on how to grow. Work felt some what aimless.

LCS values workplace "culture" a lot which is good, however in recent years the workplace culture seems to be more of a requirement for employees than an option. Hybrid schedule used to be two days in the office a week rotating (half monday tuesday, half wednesday thursday, all hybrid workers off on fridays), but was recently updated to also requiring hybrid workers to come in every other friday. This in itself isn't too terrible, but it does leave worry that they are preparing us to all come in 5 days a week again with no hybrid option if a second building is built to house everyone, despite bragging about the "flexibility they offer" with the hybrid schedule in promotional material. Additionally, the company very much preaches that it values employees and doesn't want to overwork them, but some departments are failing to put this into practice and ignoring employee concerns about impossible deadlines. There is concern that the employee-satisfaction priority at LCS is slowly being overridden by "business needs". Also, we're falling into the AI-generation fad which, while AI can certainly be a useful tool, one of our new AI letter writing tools was introduced in a way that basically said "It will write a letter with all California legal requirements included for you and you don't even have to read it over or edit it" which I cannot even begin to express what a dangerous claim that is.

- poor processes, with little to no documentation on how things work - no one willing to set hard fast rules that are industry standard for tech/software - legacy code with a mountain of tech debt and no sense of urgency to clean it up. This is a key reason why collaboration is halted across departments and deadlines are barely met, as a tough look at the codebase along with changes would create much more efficiency/better product output - do not expect to get paid fair or well here as noted in many other reviews, this is a place to get some YOE & move on - 0 transparency for pay bands or paths to promotion - enterprise software that doesn’t want to pay for internal enterprise tooling. Manually digging up metrics, stretching low tier plans to their limit, no way to see how projects you’ve worked months on have turned out etc - meeting rooms with the cheapest mice/keyboards money can buy - C-suite has openly stated how much hybrid causes ‘scheduling issues’, if another building is purchased expect to RTO or only have the option to WFH on Fridays (if that!) despite our consistent double digit growth

Poor project planning and tight deadlines. Opaque leadership (information withholding, dropping hotfix dates with very little heads up). Devs were generally brought into the loop way too late. Due to all this (among other things), projects wouldn't come out ideal at times, and collective stress levels could spike. Legacy codebase and tech stack, boring domain, boilerplate heavy codebase, highly questionable architecture, time-consuming test procedures, slow build times, lots of major inconveniences, all of which made it hard to stay engaged some days. Moderate amounts of bureaucracy made getting certain tasks done difficult, especially for projects. "Ask for permission" culture, instead of "ask for forgiveness" culture. Outdated style of measuring performance (Jira ticket quotas, defect count) which could be gamed. No reward for doing thorough code reviews or peer dev testing. Low culture of engineering excellence overall, Hard to find meaningful mentorship. Company was at an awkward size, making career growth opportunities very limited. Pay and benefits package was mediocre at best.

Hybrid/Not Fully Remote No other cons.