Pros
- Healthy culture within teams up to line-management (within engineering at least). - Knowledgeable individuals (particularly in non-profit/climate domain). - Lots of scope to have impact as there is so much that needs doing. - Relatively modern tech stack if you want to learn/sharpen skills in React/GraphQL/Nest.js. - Opportunities to take ownership in lots of different parts of the system (front end, back end, databases, architecture). You won't be silo'd to one part. - Lots of good software engineers to learn from with healthy communication within teams. - There is some movement in the right direction as an organisation with more mature/experienced people coming into senior leadership positions who understand the nature and scale of issues. - Tech for good (i.e. not selling adverts or gambling).
Cons
- No clear organisational strategy. - No transparency on upper management leadership decisions. - No good benefits package. - Below market rate salary. - No performance related pay bonuses/promotions. - Pivoting towards tech products but with very immature key players in some leadership positions (i.e. with decision making power) wrt producing software. - Fully remote (can make it difficult to build team spirit/story), though that will be a pro for some people. - Offices aren't particularly nice (though there is a long term move to find somewhere new, hopefully nicer). - No clear progression for tech workers, no well defined LR's, little internal promotion. - A lot of tech-debt in overly engineered, overly complex non-documented system created by contracting company who knew they were rolling off prior to going live. - Previous point is partly the responsibility of immature tech functions producing a contract/requirements that was not properly prioritised/designed as an MVP. - Very frustrating user experience battling "computer says no" style IT policies ( i.e. hope you enjoy doing two factor authentication 5+ times a day & hope you dont have ADHD or something where having to reach for you phone regularly really impacts your ability to sustain focus on a task). - "The business" holding unilateral decision making power over product decisions but not understanding what the products are, what the main risks and opportunities are with the tech and not understanding what it even wants. Lack of joined up thinking. - Slight brain-drain effect of more experienced people leaving due to lack of salary/career progression.