Ocado Group reviews

Work can be quite siloed to your small area without having an overview of how everything fits together.

- While regular business updates and open Q&A sessions were great at the start of the pandemic, I have more recently found them to be pretty useless for the most part as upper management refuses to clearly answer certain questions that a lot of people in the company care about, particularly in regards to topics like clarity in the pay review process. - From department heads upwards I've noticed a lot of popular phrases being used that don't really mean anything practically. At the upper levels you hear things like "we've put a lot of effort into our compensation packages" which sounds nice but doesn't really mean anything without context as to what their goals for the package are. - At lower levels the biggest one I take issue with is the constant theme that challenges like limited testing facilities drive innovation and are therefore good things - there's a constant refusal to admit that anything is just bad and needs to be fixed. - As a result of this overly positive attitude, presumably combined with middle management politics I'm not privy to, there's a constant pressure to implement new features and very little focus on reducing technical debt, which all the projects my department worked on were riddled with. - My department has struggled for the last couple of years to hire up to its planned headcount, so are constantly understaffed, and as several people have left recently that department in particular is getting to the point where the hit-by-a-bus issue is becoming more and more problematic - there's two or three developers who would cripple the department if they leave in the next 6 months.