Looks much better from a distance... - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso Geeks

Unfortunately, I think these far outweigh (and certainly outnumber) the pros. From the outside, and as a new employee, Geeks can seem like a fun and forward-thinking company to work for. Once you’re on the inside and you take a closer look, the situation is actually pretty dire. General office conditions: Office conditions vary from somewhat unpleasant to barely tolerable. The carpets are covered in stains from dog urine and excrement that were never properly cleaned, thanks to the irresponsible owners (the directors) who brought their puppies into the office without toilet-training them. In the summer months, the office is HOT. Whilst the directors and sales team remain comfortable in their well air-conditioned rooms upstairs, the majority of staff endure almost insufferable temperatures downstairs. Cheap, portable air-conditioning units were purchased which have almost no effect unless you’re sitting directly in front of one. Toilets are often dirty and there aren’t enough of them. The working hours are longer than most offices (9 am–6 pm), with absolutely no flexibility. This extra hour may not seem like much, but over the course of the year, Geeks gets an additional 30 days of work from each of its employees. Whilst the atmosphere is mostly pleasant, the tension is almost palpable when someone gets fired (which happens a lot). This is almost invariably done at the end of the day—everyone fears the 5:45 pm meeting— and the employee is often not allowed to even return to their desk to collect their belongings; they are brought over to them at the exit. Sacked employees must forgo the opportunity to say goodbye to friends and colleagues, and for those still in employment, they generally find out about the sudden departure over the next few days (depending on how ‘connected’ you are) as the rumour mill churns and everyone starts to fear for their jobs even more than usual. Management: Although they are available, many employees don’t feel comfortable approaching the directors and speaking to them in person. Generally, they make decisions and we’re informed via email. I understand that Geeks is their company and they are free to run it as they see fit, but this lack of discussion and communication when it comes to serious matters affecting all of us contributes to employees feeling undervalued. It feels very much like the directors always think they know best, “Don’t worry, this is for your own good”. In reality, this leaves employees with a feeling of animosity towards the directors, and the directors seemingly unaware (or simply indifferent). Quite some time ago, there was a staff meeting where it was announced that we would have ad-hoc meetings when there was something important to discuss. This, to me, seemed like a positive step towards opening a real dialogue with employees. However, like in so many dealings with employees and clients alike, this was promised but never delivered. Since then, there have been, amongst other things, changes to late/sick policies, an attempt to change office working hours, and a significant number of redundancies, all with no more than an email and possibly an online poll. For an employee, there isn’t much in the way of clear management structure. It’s entirely possible to be working on four different projects and therefore have eight (two per project) project managers at one time. In addition, there is no real HR department; just an online portal run by one of the directors. So if you have any issues you need to discuss, you often don’t feel you can discuss this with any senior management. Staff appraisals tend to be quite hit-and-miss. After completing an ill-conceived form, you attend a meeting run by a project manager who may know you well, or you may have barely worked with. Any feedback you have is passed on to the directors and is then generally ignored—if you’re lucky, with a brief email telling you they’re ignoring you. The company is very good at selling itself, which would be good if what it was selling was real. Every year, the company puts together successful applications for business awards and when we win or reach a shortlist the directors like to give themselves and everyone else a pat on the back. But at the same time, many of the staff are shocked and surprised at our apparent achievements. We have won awards for ‘innovation’ and ‘training and development’, but if you were to ask most developers here, they would tell you that our technology is massively out of date and the training virtually non-existent. It’s not uncommon to see friends and family of the directors, who also work at the company, getting preferential treatment. Whilst some bias is only natural, it can sometimes be frustrating and even problematic when their poorly thought-out ideas are adopted on what seems like a whim. Benefits: Salaries are well below market rate and the standard contract provides for only the legal minimum number of holidays; you can’t purchase more or carry any over. Payday is “around the 10th working day of the month”, which is quite unreliable; you expect to get paid around the 14th or 15th, but you never really know. There are six days of sick leave which are allowed. This is deducted from your monthly salary and paid back to you at the end of each August if you’ve been off at most six days in the year. However, if you’ve been off for six-and-a-half days, you receive nothing. Also, if you leave the company before the end of August, you won’t be seeing any of your sick pay back. Private health or dental care is provided after you’ve been at the company for two years and with a setup fee of around £100, I believe. This can be a good benefit if you happen to have expensive medical or dental bills, but for the majority of people, the setup fee you have to pay simply isn’t worth it unless you’re planning to stay at the company long term—which no one sensible is . A regular NHS dentist appointment costs £19.70, so after five appointments you still won’t have broken-even. It is rumoured that the directors believe the benefits such as ice-cream and soft drinks are significant and effectively boost our inadequate salaries (to the tune of a few thousand pounds). But how much ice-cream and Coke can one person really consume? Let’s say you go to the local Sainsbury’s and buy £5 worth of ice-cream and drinks each week; that’s only going to cost you £240 a year… Despite the low pay, which many of the more junior staff struggle to even live on, employees are not allowed to do outside work. I’m not talking about freelance software development which would be time-consuming and cause a possible conflict of interest, but a request to take up a Saturday job at Tesco would be denied. What harm would that do? Allow your staff to earn more money and, therefore, be generally happier and more productive employees... unthinkable. Training: Regular training is provided for PMs because they deal with clients, and I freely admit that they tend to have the most stressful jobs. However, developers get very little training at all, other than watching videos. These videos also have to be specifically approved by the directors. You would think that a software company would place more value on encouraging its developers to grow by providing more interactive training and allowing a certain freedom to explore new technologies. You would be wrong. Most junior developers who serve their two years of ‘time’, leave with not nearly enough technical knowledge gained from their work at Geeks. Yes, they learn about modelling objects and business processes, but much of the ‘trivial’ stuff handled by code generation really isn’t that trivial if you’ve never done it yourself. Not to mention the restrictions imposed by excessive and inflexible code generation, and the complete lack of exposure to modern (and even not so modern) technologies. Much of the training in other roles seems to be entirely pointless, e.g. emotional intelligence training for QAs that teaches no really useful skills. It sounds like a truly mind-numbing way to waste your employees’ time and justify the ridiculously inflated ‘training costs’ the directors claim to spend on us. The directors also seem to think that a few PowerPoint sessions can turn a salesman, who doesn’t even know what HTML is, into an IT ‘solutions consultant’. Technology: The technology used to develop software at Geeks is out of date, but perhaps worse than that, it is restrictive. What the company occasionally tries to market as a ‘programming language’ or ‘revolutionary’, M#, is nothing more than a code generation tool—and a bad one at that. Almost all projects are created with M#, which ties the hands of the developers to a very limited way of working. Furthermore, this tool is updated frequently (sometimes daily) by one person alone (one of the directors), and since there is no versioning or quality control it is commonplace for an M# update to cause breaking changes in all projects. This also affects old, inactive projects since they must be opened with the latest M# IDE. You can have a perfectly decent, working project that you finished a year ago, but if the client comes back for a minor change, when you come to open it in the new M#... everything breaks. Sometimes the fix is quick, sometimes it might take you a day or more. The directors are not up-to-date with the latest technologies and, therefore, there seems to be a fear and distrust towards them. Developers are never encouraged to learn and utilise new technologies, but are instead forced to work within the constraints of an outdated, poorly maintained tool. In general, there is a tendency to try to reinvent the wheel; and when you end up with a square wheel, you try to convince everyone that a square wheel is better somehow. A prime example is the internally-developed instant messenger application: Geeks Chat. Rather than use any of a number of free, proven tools to facilitate internal communication in the office; it was decided to create our own. The number of man-hours required to produce a product which frankly didn’t work very well is hard to believe. After more than a year of use and bug-fixing, Geeks Chat finally became reasonably stable (if somewhat slow and lacking in useful features), but the powers-that-be then decided to scrap the entire application and start again; resulting in a chat application that simply could not be relied upon to deliver your messages. A fairly basic requirement you’d think, no? There is a ‘TDD’ process in place which is flawed and doesn’t seem to conform to any standard definition of ‘TDD’ that I’ve ever read. The things that really bother me: During my time at Geeks, and from stories I’ve heard from colleagues who have been here longer than myself, the directors’ decisions seem to vary from somewhat misguided to morally reprehensible. The staff are trapped. The directors are Iranian and hire a large proportion of developers from Iran. These employees seem to get assistance in coming over, obtaining accommodation and learning English. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this; it should be commended and I’m sure those benefiting are very grateful for all the help they receive. But many of those people are sold the dream of working at an innovative software company in the UK, and after spending time here, they realise just how backwards it can be and that they left much better jobs to be in such a terrible company. However, their desire to stay in the UK and obtain Permanent Residence status means they are trapped by their visas and don’t feel able to leave. The rest of the staff are trapped by unfair contracts. Most new employees sign two-year training contracts and are told they have to pay back their training costs if they leave before two years. The worst thing is that the company estimates of these training costs are completely absurd—I’ve heard figures from around £9,000 to £16,000. There is simply no way these figures can be justified. For example, developers are essentially given access to an online video training platform, Pluralsight, for which an individual annual subscription costs $299. There is much talk amongst staff that this clause in the contract isn’t legal, but most are far too fearful to try to terminate their contracts early. New employees look forward to joining a rapidly-growing company and are happy to sign (for many, it’s their first job in a competitive market). By the time they realise what they’ve gotten into, it’s too late and they’re stuck here for two years. Staff turnover is ridiculously high, such that many people live in real fear of losing their jobs and ‘guessing who’s next to get fired or quit’ is a common game in the office. Recruitment processes are highly questionable. Apparently, a girl came from central Europe to interview for a PM position and was offered the job, even though several people who met her thought she was clearly unsuited in ability and temperament for the role. After accepting the job and moving her life over to this country, she was fired at the end of her first week. There was once a candidate for trainee developer who came in for the training course and subsequent assessment. He wasn’t offered the job, even though I heard his assessment was better than some candidates who did get an offer. He was quite severely visually-impaired. Now, I must say that I don’t know that that was the reason he didn’t get the job. But I honestly can’t see any other possibility and just the fact that I honestly believe the directors would make that kind of decision should tell you something in itself. There are worse stories about discrimination too, but I don’t want to mention them here. I really don’t believe that the directors care about the majority of their staff. There are the relative few who have closer personal relationships with them, but I think the rest of us are regarded simply as resources and not people. But even that they can’t manage well. The day after Brexit, about a dozen employees (in a company of around 80) were forced into redundancy. I understand that it’s a business and sometimes costs have to be reduced to protect the company, but it’s the manner in which it was done which really bothered me. The directors stated in a company email that they had been thinking about this possible referendum consequence for some time but they were hoping it wouldn’t come to that. But why then were they actively hiring new staff and expanding just before the referendum? And if they cared about the people, why didn’t they offer voluntary redundancies as a way of reducing overheads and avoiding compulsory redundancies for employees who wanted to stay? I’m no expert in employment law, but I do know that companies are legally required to take steps to avoid compulsory redundancies and that stopping recruitment and offering voluntary redundancies are simple, common-sense measures that could and should have been taken. The rapid expansion of the company has always been a selling point and a point of pride, but whether it was hubris or ineptitude, the directors’ irresponsible actions have seriously impacted people’s lives. The company lies to and misleads clients. Whilst there are some good ‘solutions consultants’ with years of experience in IT, many of them know nothing about the industry and are little more than salesmen. It’s not uncommon for them to promise clients that we can deliver the world on a very modest budget, just so we can get our foot in the door. These ‘consultants’, rather than really trying to help clients with their business, are only interested in getting them to sign on for (paid) workshops. All the false promises made in bad faith then become a problem for the business analysts and developers who have to really come up with solutions. Projects overrun—almost always. Yes, some projects finish on-budget and on-time, but this is VERY rare. The sales team will talk about how M# makes everything so much faster so that we can deliver, but there are limits to everything (and M# actually making things faster is highly debatable). It seems to be almost common practice here to underestimate budgets in order to win a contract. This puts a lot of pressure, particularly on PMs and lead developers, to deliver in utterly unrealistic timescales. So most projects inevitably overrun and, having invested so much already, clients have to come up with the additional funds to finish the project, or risk wasting all their initial investment. For smaller companies, in particular, this unexpected financial hardship can be insurmountable, and these people leave Geeks having wasted vast amounts of money—sometimes their life savings—on nothing. Geeks sometimes feels like a cowboy builder, who will take you for everything you’ve got and leave you with a house that is worse than when you started. I’ve never felt proud to work here and, to be honest, sometimes feel ashamed to even be a part of it.