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      Ocado Group

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      Ocado Group reviews

      3.6

      66% would recommend to a friend

      (2,018 total reviews)
      avatar

      Tim Steiner

      53% approve of CEO

      31% positive business outlook

      Ratings by category

      4.1

      Diversity & inclusion

      3.9

      Culture & values

      3.8

      Work/Life balance

      3.6

      Compensation and benefits

      3.4

      Career opportunities

      3.1

      Senior management

      Ocado Group has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 2,018 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Ocado Group employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Retail & Wholesale industry (3.5 stars).

      Ratings by demographic groups

      Reviews by job title

      2K reviews
      3.0
      Feb 23, 2021

      Easy work, Low salary, Low moral, Outdated technologies

      Software engineer e2
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      Easy to get a job, even if you lack experience or knowledge. Fantastic work-life balance. Very simple work without stress or responsibilities. Co-workers are usually friendly. Small employee discount in the Ocado shop. An interesting insight into the common best practices from 1995-2000.

      Cons

      Meagre salary. Heavy reliance on Java 6 and other outdated technologies. Almost no growth opportunities due to low technical expertise in teams. The cultural values ("Ocado principles") sound good on paper but are never followed in practice (at least in my department). Management refused to pay out bonuses despite massive corporate gains and defended the decision with insulting rhetorics. Meanwhile, the CEO has received one of the highest bonuses in the UK. In the 1st months of COVID, there were personal attacks at people who advocated wearing face-coverings. Even a company-wide prohibition of wearing face coverings in the office was active for a short period. The senior management does meet with regular employees on 1:1 meetings, but they act very happy and innocent. This makes people hesitant to point out the perilous state of most projects. Prepare to see sad-puppy faces if you reveal even the slightest issue. It's unnerving. The real danger is being stuck in this company for too long. While I would recommend Ocado for a 1-2 year working period to learn certain interesting architectural design approaches and how NOT to do certain stuff, it will kill your professional skills if you overstay.

      avatar
      Ocado Group Response
      5y
      Thanks for taking the time to leave a review and express your thoughts. Regarding your point about the way we work, we truly believe that our values differentiate us as an employer by helping individuals to grow and develop, and helping our teams to work together effectively for the best results. We are sad to hear that this hasn't been your experience so please speak with the People Team to offer any specific suggestions or feedback. We're very surprised to read your comments on the technology we use, we pride ourselves on our Tech Stack which combines a powerful set of best-in-breed languages and tools to make it easy for our teams to focus on problem solving and building the best solutions. We would also like to reassure you that we put a lot of effort into ensuring that our total packages are competitive for each location that we operate in. You make many more interesting points, all of which we will digest and share feedback and learnings with the team. Thank you.
      1.0
      Oct 4, 2020

      Inadequate

      Senior software engineer
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      It's like a kindergarden - everyone can follow their whims. No consequences

      Cons

      - Mediocre company - Lack of adequate management. Management now consists mostly of inexperienced people that are non-techincal (scrum masters). Severe lack of good management is either because most of them already quit and because, seemingly, out of desperation, they hired/promoted whoever they could. - For exapmle, technical champion of one of the offices was a person that was on the lowest position (SE1). This person later on became a team lead - Salaries are at 60% of the market at best for quite some time now, obsolete and no effort is made to update them - Not result-oriented. - Don't appreciate high achievements. - Top salaries are given to people that stay long enough in the company. - Outstanding achievements are as good as as mediocre achievements, so no need to try hard - How hard is the interview depends mostly on the people that interview you and their beliefs. - Bias towards older people - seemingly not preferred - A lot of teams were dissolved and moved to a different location without a warning - Company has "values" that are free to interpretation and interpreted as best served by the evaluator

      avatar
      Ocado Group Response
      5y
      Hi there, thank you for taking the time to share this feedback with us. Our policy is always to consider employees for promotion based on their achievements and their fit for the role. We are surprised by your comments on management and the promotions process but will take this feedback on board for future discussions. We would like to contest your suggestion of bias in recruitment. When we hire new team members, we make every effort to eliminate any bias from the process as we are firm believers in equal opportunity for everyone. We also always aim to create a consistent recruitment experience for each applicant. We appreciate your feedback on the company values. We truly believe that these values guide us to perform at the highest possible level across the organisation but we will consider your comments in future discussions about employee experience.
      1.0
      Jul 10, 2020

      Poorly set up incentives, bad management

      Software engineer
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      - Free fruits. - If you get into the right team, it can be an okay place to work.

      Cons

      - Disorganized, poor inter-team communication. - Not a meritocracy: incentives are set up so that you will get promoted if people (especially your manager) like you, not based on how well you perform. There are certain teams (for example TE) that try to compete with other teams instead of cooperating with them and it is discouraged to speak up if you disagree with something on team meetings. Avoid these teams at all cost. There is a reason why there are so many 5 star, and 1 star reviews and most of the 1 star reviews talk about the company culture. This place can be really nice or really bad based on which team you end up in and what manager you have. The problem is that higher management lets whole teams go on a really bad path by enabling team managers to hire/fire people based on their personalities (how much they avoid conflict) instead of skills, creating a comfortable environment for themselves where they cannot be criticized. This is a major disadvantage and I would not recommend people taking this risk.

      avatar
      Ocado Group Response
      5y
      Thank you for sharing this feedback, we are sorry to hear that you feel you have had this experience. We believe firmly that in the power of meritocracy and strive to encourage that. We have a number of share option incentives and a range of other benefits in place for our employees, and we are doing everything we can to maximise these.
      Viewing 100 - 102 of 2,018 Reviews
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      ReviewsOcado Group reviews

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