Pros
If you are a fan of the show Big Brother, like being underpaid and playing Hunger Games to game your stats to maybe qualify for a small raise, then this is the place for you! Pros: - Free monthly lunch. - Good flexibility for work/life balance
Cons
- Software monitoring on both your work machine and your personal machine. No trust. Some very shaded practices and not 100% transparent about all of the tracking either. - Monitoring every single mouse click, keystroke, active window, and computer activity that will report to HR and your Manager. - Flawed tracking methods on actual work done during the day. - Work-issued laptops or workstations are not provided for work from home, So this will give them access to all your personal files on your personal computer when monitored locally. - Cooperatively helping your teammates is not the methodology for this company as it will hurt your own standings. - Poor codebase and architecture. - Micro-managed. You are not allowed to work based on your strengths and value to your team (like helping unblock others and contribute to their stats), you must achieve your own stats and be a good code-monkey. - Raises are based on the Hunger Games methodology. To be considered for a raise you are put into a spreadsheet based on your stats and RANKED. Then they go down the spreadsheet and based on how much they can give for raises and your metric standings you are not likely to "make the cut" for a raise because only top performers with the highest stats will get raises. This causes everyone to game their stats, so it becomes a race and thus code quality suffers. This is not a good measure of productivity as a reward for your hard work and contributions to your team/company because it fails to capture actual work and contributions done. - There is also no way to negotiate a raise. they are pre-determined by this spreadsheet and it is not open for discussion to make a case for why you deserve a raise. - Unrecognized for saving the company $15,000 or more in work by quickly solving flaws that would have caused 5 developers to tackle during a sprint. Even after this, there was no recognition, just a manager saying the company would say "It's just part of your job and expected" even after the PO said... "this has never happened before, now we have to redo our sprint because we don't have to do all these stories now". - Pay disparity for favored workaholic staff. For example, Dev 3 salary can range from top paid of approximately 130k/year (high) down to 85k/year [low], which the low is well below the fair market salary range for Senior Developers and a 40k+ per year difference among staff for the exact same position! - Negotiate a good starting salary as you are unlikely to deviate from that unless you can get promoted (hard to do) then withdraw from the promotion a year later and KEEP your increased salary. Yes, that happened. - No RRSP matching. This is not a company you can work for long term and expect a good path to retire. Some Dev 2's have been stuck at their position for 7 years and still have not progressed to Dev 3 yet even though they ask repeatedly. - Management is out of touch and there is very little interaction and heart-to-heart conversations with staff. Suggesting ways to improve that don't align with their Big Brother measurements of productivity are dismissed. At most you will get a 1-on-1 meeting with your direct lead and being heard from becomes lost. - They use OfficeVibe for anonymous feedback. However, this isn't so anonymous as the feedback can be traced back to the monitoring software data (keystrokes) and the admins can view feedback. So being honest is likely to hurt you.
