Vantaggi
Fancy office. Open concept and equipped with high tech gadgets. Free food and snacks. Located in Chelsea. Decent pay. Some (not all) smart coworkers.
Svantaggi
The management is completely incompetent and clueless about what they want. People just talk about doing something big but no one has any idea of what they want to do or how to do it. As a result, you see a lot of pie in the sky discussions that go nowhere. It feels like some people are hired just to talk. A lot of work is started and just thrown away with an excuse that it is a startup like environment so uncertainty should be expected. In reality, its not a startup environment at all. There is a lot of politics and bureaucracy involved in all the teams. A lot of good people have left in the past year as a result of that. A common solution to the lack of direction seems to be - hire management consultants. There is no real innovative work going on at this place. They are trying to put a new user experience on the existing crappy products. However, there are a lot of groups involved which causes a lot of churn and delay in getting things done. The integration projects take about 4 to 5 times longer than they should as a result of this. Also, other groups in the company want to be part of this new "innovation lab" and they try to force themselves somehow in the work that is being done here. In general, there is a culture of being politically right rather than doing the right thing which makes things even more messy. The development that goes on has now come down to putting the code together by duct tape. The UI looks cool and fancy but the underlying code is horrible and not built to scale at all. The company is trying to be agile but there are still a lot of adhoc requests and managers think they have the authority over the people working for them. As a result, you cannot push back and decline these sometimes ridiculous requests. The company seems to be hiring people for more than a year now. This is partly due to the fact that good people don't stay at this place. Some go back to the companies they came from. Ive also heard instances where people have been lied to their face about the job responsibilities when interviewing. Calling this place an innovative company or even a tech company would be a joke.
