A good company - Machine Learning Engineer FootfallCam Employee Review

1. Work-Life Balance That “precision” balance? It’s a strict 12 hours of work, 12 hours of life split—every single day. And the best part? It also take weekends, public holidays, or even your personal leave days off. You get that sweet 50/50 split whenever, wherever. 2. Full Software Development Lifecycle We all know SDLC (whether agile or waterfall) has seven core steps: Planning, Requirement Gathering, Design, Development, Testing, Deployment, Maintenance. Here’s how Footfallcam (FFC) nails their version of it: - Planning: Schedule a client call, then promise the moon and stars—no matter if it’s actually achievable. - Requirement Gathering: Client requests = gospel. Rational or not, feasible or not—they’re what developers have to build. Even the ones that sound like a pipe dream. - Design: ChatGPT is the official design team. Whatever it spits out is the final blueprint—no validation, no feasibility checks, nada. At FFC, CTO = Command-line To OpenAI - Development: As a dev, you’ll be promoted to CTO (Chief Token Officer)—your main job is to pump prompts into ChatGPT, not write scalable, reusable, structured code. The result? A codebase chock-full of technical debt, duplicate code scattered everywhere, and logic that needs 10 different tweaks just to fix one bug. Deadlines are so tight you’ll only ever add more code to the mess instead of cleaning it up. Why? Because writing reusable code is “not a KPI”—only cranking out quick results counts. And don’t even get me started on secure coding practices (see Point 8 for that). - Testing: What’s gray-box testing? A/B testing? Load testing? Cybersecurity testing? Compatibility testing? Performance testing? Regression testing? Integration testing? Boundary value analysis? Never heard of ’em. The FFC testing playbook is simple: Write an API, send one correct request via Postman, if it returns a 200—boom, tested and approved. Error handling? Authentication checks? Data security? Total afterthoughts. Real testing only happens when a user or client complains. And when they do? Say hello to “Quick Response & Short-Term Planning” (see Point 4). - Deployment: Normally, deployment means encrypting code, optimizing performance, and keeping things tight. At FFC? It’s chaos, plain and simple: ① Anyone can push code directly to master/production—no code reviews, no questions asked. ② Everyone gets root/admin access to servers—so you can pull, edit, and deploy whatever you want, whenever you want. ③ Version control? A joke. Production code is always out of sync with the repo, and random uncommitted changes on the server are par for the course. ④ Want to deploy? Just run a random command (you have full permission!) and call it a day. - Maintenance: The golden rule? If it works, don’t touch it—even if it’s held together with duct tape and prayers. When something breaks, you’ll have to cram days’ worth of testing work into a few hours. Oh, and you’ll also need to make a fancy “visual report” to impress management—fancy their way, not the technically correct way. 3. Multitasking Mastery Thanks to that “amazing” SDLC, your to-do list will get derailed every 10 minutes by random tasks. Multitasking here doesn’t mean prioritizing smart—it means being a human parallel processor. You’ll get bombarded with tasks from every corner of the company, often from the same person who just gave you another assignment an hour ago. They don’t care if you’re in the middle of a focused task—they just want their work done now. And forget about automating repetitive work with code—management would rather pile it all on you than let you spend time building something efficient.  4. Quick Response & Short-Term Planning To survive FFC’s workflow, you need to respond faster than a cat to a laser pointer and plan shorter than a TikTok video. Why the rush? You have to finish the current request before management changes their mind—otherwise, you’re labeled “unproductive.” How short is “short-term planning”? Sometimes an hour, sometimes a day—depends on whatever idea popped into their heads that morning.  5. Cross-Functional Collaboration In normal companies, teams stick to their expertise to maximize efficiency. At FFC? You’ll be a one-person show—handling hardware, software, databases, front-end, back-end, and business tasks all at once. The kicker? Your job title won’t change one bit, but your technical skills? They’ll slowly fade until they’re basically high school level.  6. Prototype Delivery In real dev work, a prototype is a rough draft—used to test ideas, get feedback, and refine before launch. At FFC? Prototype delivery = shipping the rough draft directly to clients as the final product—no polish, no fixes, straight to production.  7. EQ Boost Yeah, you read that right—EQ, not IQ, not technical skills. Here’s what “EQ growth” really means: Learn to nod and smile, even when your leader is dead wrong. You have to obey every order, no matter how ridiculous the request. Need to make it work? You’ll resort to hardcoding hacks, database tweaks, custom logic for specific user IDs, and config files longer than a novel. And when you finally get it to “work”? You’ll have to come up with a fancy explanation to make that janky solution sound like a genius move. 8. Great Learning Environment Wondering why this is a “pro”? Simple—it’s all self-taught. If you take every ChatGPT warning, every “this is a bad idea” flag, and every hacky workaround as a learning opportunity? You will get better. Because the problems here are so obvious, even ChatGPT can spot them. Reusable code? Nah, copy-pasting is faster. Object-oriented programming? Too complicated—“result-oriented coding” is the way to go. Algorithms and data structures? Who needs ’em—just add a few more for-loops and extra threads, and it’ll “work.”