Toxic and Volatile - Recensione dipendente - Software Engineer presso HeliosX Group

Too much focus on short term at the expense of ever being able to scale to the projected ambitions of the company. Little to no product direction resulting in extremely ambiguous engineering work and arbitrary deadlines in which engineering have no input in. 90% of engineers are working on legacy Java monoliths with little to no progress being made on modernisation efforts. The people who were hired to drive forward these efforts on both the front and backend are being strangled by an infinite stream of bugs and “quick wins” in the existing system. At HeliosX, everything that is not the existing way of doing things is seen as unnecessary bloat. The line between perfect and pragmatic is never met - everything is just do it as quick as you can regardless of how it will be supported or scaled in the future. The culture in itself I would describe as toxic. Company values are often abused as an attempt to gain favour with SLT rather than to progress the company to where it wants to be. There is also an element of backstabbing to the culture where if people do not get their own way they will not challenge in appropriate forums and commit to an approach - they will run to the inner circle and complain months later. Individual engineers are scrutinised from the very top on the number of story points that they deliver instead of being judged on the value they are providing. Being seen as busy seems to be the key performance metric making any personal development non existent. The company tend to play fast and loose with regulation resulting in some uncomfortable requests which when challenged on ethical grounds are ignored. This makes some engineers feel extremely uncomfortable from a personal liability point of view. Layoffs at the beginning of the year were not handled particularly well. A group of key people were removed for cost saving purposes while SLT jetted off to the US just months later. Not a very good look.