Vantaggi
- Pretty good environment for a fresh graduate, and decent starting pay compared to other companies - Good place to learn about software engineering knowledge for someone inexperienced. - You can sort of communicate freely and casually with people without the hierarchical barriers in some relatively more traditional organizations. - Some interesting products being developed but are mostly non-financial. - Not much politics, but people do gossip, because everyone’s a victim of the same problems described below. - Fast and a profitable company in recent times, earning huge revenue with low operating costs and tax. Hopefully that translates to a higher than industry yearly adjustment and probably an ok bonus (but does not necessarily scale accordingly). There are more meritocratic environment elsewhere though. - There are decent personal development budget if you want to take some courses (but you got to pay on your own first and claim once you complete them, which may seem like a disadvantage if it’s expensive). Other than that, T&D is pretty non-existent for non-new-joiners. - Generous monthly team building and team lunch budget. - Free Friday lunch and a nice new office in Cyberjaya.
Svantaggi
- Not really a financial brokerage. Largely focus on synthetic indices and gambling products. If you want to work on financial products/ derivatives, look elsewhere. - Casino management style in managing some risk. - Management changes their mind too quickly and only plan for the short term (max 3-6 months only). Always seek low hanging fruit (fast products that make quick money). - Too much power concentrated in the hands of a few and lack of data-driven decision making. A lot of decisions go by “I feel this is going to work”. - They also like to do things differently. Structural and organisational changes can happen very quickly . This may or may not be a con depending on how you see it. But it’s a 20+ year old company with high growth only in recent years. Whether it pays to be different is very subjective and I leave it up to the reader. - Pay scale saturates very quickly as you progress to more senior roles. The company prefers and are willing to gamble on younger employees anyway because they don’t really know how to handle senior roles. Also, I believe that way they have more control. - No WFH flexibility (are we actually a tech firm?). Rigid process to request for WFH. If WFH is approved, you will need to use a software that tracks your hours and takes 3 random screenshots every 10 mins. - Covid matters: you can easily find matters related to this in previous reviews. There are strong contradicting policies. Company is afraid that you spread the virus, so it became a mandate to get vaccinated or get fired. But at the same time, they are afraid that you are unproductive (even with the tracking software) and they made everyone come back to office to work during height of covid. While the pandemic might be coming to an end, this gives you an idea how insecure the company is and how the company functions. - Visibility plays a huge role in securing a good bonus. It's discretionary and lacks transparency. - Lots of non-standard HR practices. Some are ok, some are ridiculous. HR does not represent employees’ voices, nor at least pretend to. Need better internal comms and change management to improve this. - Generous promotions, but your compensation only get adjusted after 3-4 months of probation. - Micro-management. Ties back to my point on visibility. - The above reasons lead to very high turnover rate, but we’re gonna keep hiring aggressively anyway.