Great culture, Bad management - Software Developer Luminous Group Employee Review

The people are friendly enough. Decent and practical hiring process. Career advancement exists but only because of the churn rate of people in the middle levels of the company leading to default "promotions".

I've never had a such high output as a developer yet been treated so poorly for it. When I changed jobs I increased my pay by 64% and the perceived workload halved. I went through 3 direct managers in my last year here because they kept leaving for better pastures. Not that it matters because upper management steamrolled team planning and directly micromanaged every task that took longer than a day anyway. And if seniors weren't reviewing my code due to being swamped themselves, it was my fault for not chasing them hard enough to close the tickets. I had heart rate spikes over 130BPM getting on calls with a handful of individuals, including "employee number 1". This job made me lie in my bed and cry on some mornings. They are beholden to own customer, namely Aramco, who demand extra unscoped work outside of the contracted work package because they are too financially important. Luminous makes claims about features being complete when they are still in prototype phase so that they can sell more contracts which they don't have the resource to finish in time. When deadlines were close of missed (I can't recall many cases of being comfortably on time) good development standard practices would disintegrate. The bottom line is the pay is very poor for what they demand. Luminous markets itself as a software as a service company but pays like a D-tier mobile games company and demands dedication of devs at an A-tier games company.

None at all. Trust me.

The environment was honestly awful. There was constant micromanagement, and the whole place felt toxic from the top down. Management seemed more interested in blaming others than taking responsibility, and the pay just wasn't fair for the amount of work we did. On top of that, there was this constant pressure to work long hours, like they expected us to be fine with sacrificing our personal time. And don't even get me started on the fake "everything's great" attitude — it just felt like a way to ignore all the real issues. Honestly, there wasn’t a single part of that place that didn’t feel off.