1. Professionals + friends. The company has a significant number of genuinely great specialists. There are lots of people, working with whom can really boost your technical skills. And, importantly, a factor that keeps you at this company despite everything is the friends you can find among your colleagues.
2. Entertainment. If there’s one thing they do well, it’s company parties. Ibiza for 2500+ employees from all over the world was something else.
3. “Perks.” There’s a lot of this: breakfasts, lunches, the actual “perks” in the classic sense, turkey for Thanksgiving, pancakes for Maslenitsa, and lots and lots more. Usually, you may not even use them, and you may not care that any of this is there, but the mere fact that the company tries so hard for its employees is nice![/center]
2. Entertainment. If there’s one thing they do well, it’s company parties. Ibiza for 2500+ employees from all over the world was something else.
3. “Perks.” There’s a lot of this: breakfasts, lunches, the actual “perks” in the classic sense, turkey for Thanksgiving, pancakes for Maslenitsa, and lots and lots more. Usually, you may not even use them, and you may not care that any of this is there, but the mere fact that the company tries so hard for its employees is nice![/center]
And now for the not-so-pleasant stuff, here we go:
1. You might get lucky enough to join a team where the team lead, after 4 months of feature development, still doesn’t understand how it works, and every day will be Groundhog Day for you: again and again, you’ll have to explain which services are used, who’s responsible for what, who uploads what and where, how it’s checked—EVERY single day, for crying out loud! (Hi, Ivan Dolgikh)
2. That same team lead (formerly a client-side developer) may independently estimate a feature, 80% of whose development happens in the back office and on the server, neither of which he understands in principle. No matter how many times you tell him it’s impossible, no matter how loudly you raise the alarm, everyone will think you’re doing fine and are just “creating panic” (ц), right up until the feature’s deadline, when you haven’t even got half of it done. And then they’ll demand that you deliver what you “signed up for.” Umm... At what point did I sign up for this, or did any of my colleagues?
3. Overtime. Regular and unpaid. The company seems to try to reward you somehow, and every few months gives you a certificate stamped “secret,” calling it “for your contribution to the work,” but (!) this certificate is only given to people who have overtime logged in the system. That is, you can come to work, stay late over a glass of semi-sweet wine, and get a certificate, or you can come in and work your ass off for 9 hours, and no one will say a word to you. And let’s be honest: 20+ hours of overtime a month and a certificate for 500 hryvnias every few months is not compensation.
4. Overtime on weekdays is one thing; they may also regularly “suggest” that you come in and work on Saturday. Of course I turn down this tempting offer, but once they asked me to come in on Saturday and offered, as compensation, that when the team finished developing the feature, I could take a day off in the middle of the week whenever I wanted and book it as a business trip. The team lead assured me that everything had been approved by senior management, and that it wasn’t up for discussion. Nevertheless, when we handed the feature over to the product people, I announced I was leaving, we agreed on the dates, and on one of my last days I said I wanted to use my business trip. They told me, “I don’t know, like, whether everything was actually approved, like.” In the end, there were 100500 excuses, and they sent me from one person to another (hi again, Ivan Dolgikh)!
5. When I was leaving, HR asked me where I’d been before, why I hadn’t come in and talked about the problems—how could they know or see any of it (ha!). And I did start thinking about it. On my last working day, another person quit; I see lots of unhappy people, and even if I, with my personality, didn’t come forward and say anything, maybe the problem isn’t me? When I talked it over with HR later, I remembered a situation where two colleagues complained to her about another problem, and I asked what had been done. The answer I got was: “What do you think I should have done?”
2. That same team lead (formerly a client-side developer) may independently estimate a feature, 80% of whose development happens in the back office and on the server, neither of which he understands in principle. No matter how many times you tell him it’s impossible, no matter how loudly you raise the alarm, everyone will think you’re doing fine and are just “creating panic” (ц), right up until the feature’s deadline, when you haven’t even got half of it done. And then they’ll demand that you deliver what you “signed up for.” Umm... At what point did I sign up for this, or did any of my colleagues?
3. Overtime. Regular and unpaid. The company seems to try to reward you somehow, and every few months gives you a certificate stamped “secret,” calling it “for your contribution to the work,” but (!) this certificate is only given to people who have overtime logged in the system. That is, you can come to work, stay late over a glass of semi-sweet wine, and get a certificate, or you can come in and work your ass off for 9 hours, and no one will say a word to you. And let’s be honest: 20+ hours of overtime a month and a certificate for 500 hryvnias every few months is not compensation.
4. Overtime on weekdays is one thing; they may also regularly “suggest” that you come in and work on Saturday. Of course I turn down this tempting offer, but once they asked me to come in on Saturday and offered, as compensation, that when the team finished developing the feature, I could take a day off in the middle of the week whenever I wanted and book it as a business trip. The team lead assured me that everything had been approved by senior management, and that it wasn’t up for discussion. Nevertheless, when we handed the feature over to the product people, I announced I was leaving, we agreed on the dates, and on one of my last days I said I wanted to use my business trip. They told me, “I don’t know, like, whether everything was actually approved, like.” In the end, there were 100500 excuses, and they sent me from one person to another (hi again, Ivan Dolgikh)!
5. When I was leaving, HR asked me where I’d been before, why I hadn’t come in and talked about the problems—how could they know or see any of it (ha!). And I did start thinking about it. On my last working day, another person quit; I see lots of unhappy people, and even if I, with my personality, didn’t come forward and say anything, maybe the problem isn’t me? When I talked it over with HR later, I remembered a situation where two colleagues complained to her about another problem, and I asked what had been done. The answer I got was: “What do you think I should have done?”
And that’s basically the answer.
That’s how my collaboration came to be. Would I recommend this company to you? I don’t know. As you can see, there’s a lot of negativity, but (!) we really leveled up our skills with a team lead like that! Besides, as I’ve already said, there are lots of teams, lots of people, lots of specialists at the company. Not everyone ends up in a situation like this, but that’s why I’m leaving this review: so you know that situations at “““Pletitsa””” can vary.
