Vantaggi
- Friendly coworkers and welcoming environment I was always made to feel welcome from day one. I never felt afraid to ask a stupid question and people were always willing to take time out of their day to help me. - Regular fun social events The social club do a great job of hosting fun events for everyone, even during lockdowns: beverage tasting nights, lawn bowls, food vouchers. On Friday nights there would be people sharing a drink and playing table tennis, darts, board games and enjoying each others' company. - Generally a fantastic group of people to work with Gentrack makes a clear effort to employ people who you will enjoy working with. I made many good friends there. - Flexible working arrangements Working from home three days per week. Gentrack offers flexibility for doctors appointments, looking after family, etc. - Very slowly moving towards newer technology Gentrack are slowly moving away from the old, outdated technology stack they currently work with. Only a small number of staff have the opportunity to work on this project and there is a very long way to go before most developers are working with modern technology.
Svantaggi
- Proprietary language Gentrack uses an in-house programming language which lacks many of the features of modern ones. This can make simple tasks much more difficult than necessary because developers do not have the resources and documentation they expect. - Poor coding standards The code base is ancient, poorly documented, inconsistent and rife with programming no-no's. Subroutines approaching 10,000 lines long and using GOTOs instead of functions are very common. It is impossible to develop effectively when navigating 10,000 lines of undocumented code with dozens of poorly named GOTOs using the same scope. Code reviews were almost non-existent and a lot of poor quality code slipped through the cracks. Many examples would not pass a high school programming class. - Lack of documentation Many key programs have next to no documentation in any form, written or code comments. So much knowledge is held by experienced employees and kept nowhere else. The only way to learn some critical functions and design choices of the product is to find someone who knows. Customers had significantly better guides on using the software than Gentrack themselves. - Direct customer interaction with developers Customers have direct access to developers. This results in a huge amount of developers' time being used up answering simple questions and supporting customers. You could be pulled away from your work at any time because a customer messages you asking for help. - Pay The pay is somewhat low for a software engineer, especially for one working with outdated, proprietary technology that offers them no future outside of the company. Starting pay for a graduate is low but fair, but too low for more experienced roles. Recently all salaries were reviewed across the board. Developers meeting expectations were offered a 4.5% raise. To my knowledge this was the first raise offered in many years. A raise of this size is what I would expect in a typical annual salary review as it barely beats inflation. - Employee retention Gentrack is losing employees incredibly quickly. Sometimes multiple employees in a given week. Due to the in-house technology it is impossible to hire senior developers. Senior staff are leaving and taking a huge amount of knowledge with them. These staff can only be replaced with graduates with the hope that they will stay for long enough to replace experienced staff. Even graduates are leaving after less than a year.