First Clarity Reviews

Well, let's see. The CEO (used to) think he's the CTO and enjoys making moderately questionable decisions in order to provide to the client. These include rushing projects through due to timelines that are, in the gentlest term possible, unrealistic. Pushing staff to work till 10.30pm due to said timelines being so unrealistic. No "come in late" tomorrow morning was in evidence, even though the CEO came in at midday. Not allowing staff time off in lieu for ridiculous workloads out of hours. Not keeping clients up to date with actual progress of projects, even though "Agile methodology" is supposedly applied. Bad payment systems. Bad HR. CEO didn't get in before midday at least. A declaration of "Never do another system deployment on a Friday again" lasted 3 days and then another system deployment was carried out next Friday. Staff were run into the ground and churned out. No staff training. Recruitment staff at First Calamity tried to recruit me to work there while I was working there. .. QAs were incompetent and had no idea how to test a site properly. Agile methodology was simply not followed. Pandering to clients in order to get their business at the expense of staff's work-life balance (which was already nonexistent).

They will dangle the metaphorical carrot continually as they remove any chance of a work / life balance. You be asked to work over time for no reward, no pay, no time in lieu and no thanks. You will be asked to make decisions and take responsibility, however this will be followed up with zero backup from management if you are not able to accurately predict a constantly changing end goal. You will strive to provide a good service and product to then either be forced to ruin everything you have created or watch as senior management log on to production servers that are handling live traffic and make changes with no warning or record of what's taken place. You will receive no backing from management over any issue, they will not give you the time of day other than to ask more from you. You will see first hand how not to handle any given situation. i.e. lie to clients that functionality exists while desperately trying to create it. At the same time they will tell a client another piece of functionality doesn't exist and charge them to create it, all the while it was already there. You will see code freezes put in place for them to be ignored 10+ times in the space of a week. You will watch senior management push releases to production with zero testing. You will watch senior management push releases that have failed testing. You will be asked to push new releases to prod at 17:30 on a Friday as you are leaving the office. You will see senior management coming over to ask why the production URLs, that have been passed to clients, don't work. This will be because no one has engaged the IT team to even request the servers, let alone check the URLs are valid before handing them to the client. You will see Project Managers chastised for communication accurate information to the client when a project is delayed, to then go over their head to tell a client everything is fine, and then drop them in it when it turns out there really was a delay. You will see failures lead to increase process only for the new process to be ignored in less than a week. You will see more process brought in to combat this, for it to be ignore in less than a week. You will see this repeating throughout your tenure. You will see senior management take no responsibility for their mistakes. If you get to see the senior management meetings, you will see no member of senior management communicate what the problems were and how they were created despite how apparent they are. (i.e. an order from the top saying to release code that is known to cause problems). You will see staff walked over and treated with total contempt and a complete lack of respect. Avoid this company at ALL costs. It is not worth the time and effort for what little reward they offer.