Pros
- Engineering and support teams are full of excellent techs. The technical standards are high so you're always learning from your colleagues. - Great culture of mentorship on the support teams I worked on, lots of senior techs willing to help you learn and managers supporting you taking time to attend training etc. Strong on boarding, and continuous feedback on your work makes personal growth really easy, lots of opportunity for promotion and taking on more senior roles/responsibility on the teams I worked for. - Company really does seem to have the right intentions with regard to work/life balance, perks and taking care of employees. The benefits package is great and the office in the UK has plenty of amenities. - Now that company is private again they seem to be getting back to the original focus on core products and less attention being paid to just churning out quarterly results. Long term investment in a single strategy will hopefully pay off in the future. - Basically everyone I worked with was smart, driven and fundamentally nice. If you have even the slightest desire to learn and advance your technical career you'll be afforded plenty of opportunities to do so.
Cons
- Management at a senior level in the UK isn't great. There's a real 'old boys' network where those closest to senior execs get promoted constantly and are not up to the task. - That leads to an excess of 'middle managers' where people get stuck unable to move up the chain and so end up having positions at the same lateral level created for them ending up with too many middle managers. The benefit is they tend to not be bad managers, so you'll probably end up with a good line manager, but their effectiveness is reduced because there's so many of them and they have no real ability to make changes as a result. - Company has historically not focused on support teams enough, they like to make sweeping changes of work patterns, or not invest enough in support. That leads to burnout and people leaving and an inability to fill their roles with equally senior techs.
