Vantaggi
Good salary and benefits, people are very pleasant, work/life balance is excellent, office is nice.
Svantaggi
It’s important to make the right decision for you, so here are some things I wish I knew before joining. **Benefits** Bonuses are paid in March and people on probation (first six months) aren’t eligible to receive one. This means that if you join NewDay from October onwards, it isn’t possible for you to receive a bonus for about a year and a half. The window to buy extra holiday is only open in January and those on probation aren’t eligible to do so, so if you join NewDay after August, you won’t be able to buy extra holiday until the year after the year after you join. NewDay doesn’t offer paid sick leave (beyond legal minimums) while on probation. None of the above was made clear at offer stage, it was only after joining that they became clear. **Titles** NewDay’s job titles differ significantly from their peers. If you’re applying for a ‘lead developer’ role, that’s the equivalent of ‘engineering manager’ elsewhere. ‘Engineering manager’ at NewDay is the equivalent of a ‘senior engineering manager’ at other companies (managing managers). NewDay has three people with the title ‘head of engineering’, which in most companies is a solo title, and so on. Be sure you’re interviewing for the role you think you’re interviewing for. **Engineering culture and technology** If you’re used to modern tech company culture, NewDay may be different from what you’re expecting. It functions more like a large non-tech organisation than a true tech company. Some ways this manifests: There are limited avenues for sharing knowledge and best practice across teams, which causes silos. A high percentage of contractors. They’re very competent, but it limits the avenues for progression – for example, if you’re managing a team and want to groom a successor, you may have limited opportunities in your team for that as contractors can’t be managers. Expect to receive out-of-date hardware. NewDay is not a place to get a high spec, fast, laptop and high resolution monitors. Infrastructure isn’t modern, although this is a known problem and the company is working on improving it. For example, there is no continuous deployment, and releases are very manual and error prone. Your team will be expected to manage servers, load balancers, etc manually. I’d like to see NewDay develop modern tooling to empower teams to manage their infrastructure without having to become experts in Azure. DevOps has a sweet spot where teams control their stack without being completely left to run their own infrastructure, and NewDay isn’t there yet. As a result of this, your team will spend just as much (or more) time fighting tooling and flaky infrastructure than writing and maintaining code. The company runs on Microsoft Teams, which is a very poor facsimile of Slack. It's not a matter of preference, it's a much worse tool for collaboration within and outside of teams, which has a tangible effect on teams' ability to work well together. You’ll be required to do lots of online training on all kinds of things. In particular, the yearly 'secure code warrior' training feels very patronising and not a good use of time. NewDay’s engineering organisation is aware of many of these issues, so you may be able to positively impact them. There is an appetite in the company for improving the engineering culture.
