Vantaggi
There were some great people in the IT department, whom did form a fantastic team in spite of abhorrent abuse and mismanagement by the board and senior management teams.
Svantaggi
- Marketing-led business, meaning that false promises are being sold to customers, then IT would be told in the 11th (sometimes 12th) hour that some absurd development needed to be achieved by some entirely arbitrary, uninformed, and outright impossible deadline. - Senior management do not listen to the experience of those whom they supposedly hired specifically to take advantage of their knowledge and experience. - Failures are passed down the chain, despite being failures from the top. Everyone dreads being nominated as the next patsy to cover up the board/management mistakes. - Treat employees like replaceable commodities, to the point where employee retention has become the poorest I have ever seen in any company. Management dismisses this as being a consequence of “running a call centre, and call centre staff come and go,” but the staff exodus occurs in every department, far beyond the call centre. - Employees are routinely lied to and misled by senior management, about everything from priorities, through expectations, right down to pay and perks. - Promise (in writing, which I have retained) to pay any and all overtime required to achieve an otherwise-impossible delivery deadline, then they don’t actually pay it. In total, I am owed 11.5 DAYS of overtime pay, all accrued in a single month, to achieve what would otherwise have been entirely impossible. AND I ACHIEVED IT, TOO! - In 14 months of working for WNS Assistance, not a single payslip was correct. - Would rather lose experienced and tenured staff than provide even a rudimentary cost of living pay rise. They refuse pay rises for minimum wage staff that have been working, diligently and productively, with them for YEARS... even though it costs far more to hire their replacements. - Management have no desire to improve processes, and prefer instead to find inventive ways to shirk their responsibilities onto their subordinates. - Most insulting “Bonus” scheme I have ever witnessed. To give you some perspective, the highest staff bonus (below board level, of course) was £200 (so far as I can determine, with more than a dozen people disclosing their pathetic bonus to me in conversation) in 2019. Personally, I would rather not give any bonus at all to a member of my team than insult them with an amount so pathetic and soul-destroying. - There is zero prospect for career progression. Even if your line manager informs you that you’ve been promoted to the next level in your career path, your job title will never change to reflect it... and your pay certainly never will. - No effort made AT ALL to address constraints within the system (bottlenecked resources whom are subject to insurmountable demand from multiple departments) and instead attempt to bully the constraint resources into “doing more with less.” - A legacy code estate that is by far and away the worst I have ever had the misfortune to encounter (well over 1 million lines of ancient Delphi code, and that’s AFTER I removed more than 1 million more lines), and yet all further development is constrained by board/management unwillingness to move away from crumbled and failing old systems. They literally take a copy of the codebase, then change it to handle another line of business... with no attempt to reduce or eliminate technical debt, or even prevent the introduction of NEW technical debt. - More concerned by MALE members of staff adhering to draconian dress codes than their comfort or even their output; yet FEMALE staff members have absolutely no dress code. - Illegally terminate employment contracts when WNS Group (parent company in India) decide to outsource all IT development operations to India to cut costs; rather than issuing redundancies as the law requires. This is apparent as there are now zero full-time development staff at WNS Assistance, and no job vacancies to replace them. By definition, that means those staff members were made redundant, yet not one (myself included) was officially made redundant... instead we were summarily dismissed with no reason given. - No sense of direction; still scrambling to honour absurd sales commitments misrepresented to clients years in the past. Current senior management blames all of these unhonoured promises on the previous management regime, and yet the current business practice still sees sales representatives misrepresenting products and services. Nothing has changed, only the faces and names of those steering the ship towards the rocks.