Never work for a company under budget cut - Senior Web Developer Mendeley Employee Review

Lots of free food, drinking during lunch hour, not much work to do on many teams.

Employees don't take their job seriously. My team lead called in sick constantly when they were actually just out drinking late at night. Many employees are not remotely skilled at their job and only seem interested in socializing and partying. The company has never been profitable and the CEO said they had no intention of being profitable, they just wanted to sell to a bigger company, which they did, Elsevier. But they had no interest in supporting Elsevier's mission. I got put on some work groups with Elsevier and was instructed to just say yes to whatever they asked, and then not implement anything and put them off if they asked for updates. I was extremely uncomfortable with this, since Elsevier would have been where I'd need to go for promotions. During Elsevier trainings, employees paid no attention whatsoever, instead just chatting with each other on their phones under the table, and making fun of the Elsevier trainings in their private chat channel. Total joke.

The project work was interesting and engineers had a strong involvement with the DevOps side of the process, being responsible for the infrastructure for their own services, (within the guidelines set by the operations team). Most, if not all, teams had embraced agile ways of working and the continuous deployment to Production meant that it was quick to get code changes released once they'd been through the review process. The company had a bit of a feel of a start-up but seemed well established in its product(s) and where it was heading. There was a decent sized kitchen space with table football and table tennis, and a good social atmosphere within the office.

There were one or two people who tended to be the last to arrive at the office in the morning and the first to leave at the end of the day. Combined with playing table football, (particularly Friday afternoons), they didn't really delivery very much software. This may be normal within an office of that size, but it seemed unfair that they got away with it, while their colleagues at a similar level worked hard and didn't always get recognised for the notable difference in value that they brought.