Lies lies lies - Operations NewsNow Employee Review

NewsNow is a really unique place to work; it's a small company with an amazingly skilled team, exciting tech, a great product with a strong social purpose and a huge user base. It's also not a startup - it's a stable, well-established business, with mature processes and revenue streams, meaning that while it embraces the positive aspects of startup culture, such as small teams, remote working, technical innovation, and office culture, it is not subject to the financial constraints or time pressure of a typical tech startup. The business hierarchy is relatively flat, and everyone is able to interact directly with senior management to impact decisions within the business. Communication is effortless and the overall culture is deeply collaborative. Staff members are appreciated and credited for their achievements and career progression is encouraged and facilitated.

The codebase is somewhat unconventional (though very well written), and requires more time than most to become familiar with. However, it is about to undergo a significant upgrade to more contemporary, industry-standard technologies. Sometimes it can take a while for lower-priority projects to be approved or signed off. This is somewhat natural, especially for small companies, but I would love to see if we can improve this process a bit.

Fully remote as standard, fairly regular pay reviews, annual bonus, not very high pressure work (not many deadlines, and the ones which do get set don't really matter much).

It used to be great but has really lost its way in recent times. There's been a huge hemorrhage of developers in the last 12 months (about 10 resignations, the entire department is a different set of faces now). As a result there's not much banter anymore and morale is extremely low. Further to this, the management has gone very downhill. It used to feel like a very collaborative environment but now there's far more of a blame culture and very little accountability from management. There is also little trust, and the requirement for strict time tracking from all employees. Add to this the outdated tech stack and legacy code, it makes it quite an undesirable place to work compared to others. Simply put it has fallen behind the rest of the industry and has no real tangible benefits compared to anywhere else.