TPP Reviews

All of TPP’s problems can be traced back to its CEO, Frank Hester. The man is deeply insecure and wants nothing more than a band of kowtowing drones to feed his ego. It’s apparent that Frank has few people to associate with outside of work and longs to make friends with his employees, though the feeling is rarely mutual. Several employees have spoken of late-night phone calls from him, which never have anything to do with actual work, but rather whatever happens to be on Frank’s mind. This alone would be a sizeable invasion of privacy, but throw in the fact that Frank is often intoxicated and/or looking to dig up dirt on whichever employee he is currently suspecting of dissent and you're looking at a CEO with absolutely no concept of what’s appropriate. Not only does Frank often make racist or sexist “jokes”, but he revels in his Trumpian filter and expects you to laugh alongside him. Failure to comply can be seen as grounds for dismissal. Virtually none of the longstanding employees engage in non-mandatory company social events, presumably to avoid having to socialise with Frank and risk getting on his bad side, however unintentional it may be. TPP maintains that it has a flat hierarchy, which is half true. There are no managers, only employees and a handful of directors. More senior employees’ opinions will, perhaps naturally, be considered with more weight, but you can approach most anyone you need to at any time and they will generally listen to what you have to say. However, some of the more senior employees and directors have some sort of superiority complex and it shows. Their word is final and their reasoning on matters is usually little more than “this is the way we’ve always operated”. Such reluctance to change is frustrating at best and detrimental to the company at worst. It’s a common occurrence to see a director or senior employee openly berating another employee, which fosters an environment where disrespect is seen as par for the course. The directors themselves answer only to Frank, who himself mistreats them, thus completing the pyramid of abuse. Speaking up about any of this can be seen as a reason to sack you, which brings me to my next point. The turnover rate is absolutely abysmal. Since September 2017, there were probably around 100 new hires across all departments. At a push, maybe 15 remain at the time of writing. On top of this, the largest team, the coders, has plummeted from around 70 to 25 in three years. The reason for this egregious loss of life is, you guessed it, Frank. He boasts how he once attended a talk and appeared to be the only attendee to agree when the speaker suggested that any employee who is not right for the company should be terminated. Sadly, it seems that Frank has mistaken “the company” for “Frank” and will ruthlessly sack anybody who is even suspected of being against him in any way. You are fully expendable, and Frank will admit as much, often bragging that he only requires 14 employees to keep the business afloat. Perhaps for every three employees that are sacked, one leaves of their own volition, but of the twenty such people I’ve spoken to, none would recommend TPP as a nice place to work. Employees are often asked to write company reviews during work hours, including here on Glassdoor and for The Sunday Times Top 100 Small Companies to Work For award, which TPP are now banned from entering. While I can’t prove that several of these reviews are written by the same people, the similar rhetoric found time and time again would seem to suggest they are (perhaps there will be more verbose 5-star reviews dated after this review?). As for non-duplicate reviews, nobody will risk writing anything negative about the company at work for fear that a wandering director may spot it and end their employment on the spot. One of the perks listed here often is a good work-life balance. While it’s true that less than 40 hours a week is pretty reasonable for the salary that is offered, you are expected to be on call 24/7. This applies to some teams more than others, but suffice to say it’s hard not to think about work outside of work when it could phone you at any time. Given how many bugs make it into production code, late-night conference calls are not an uncommon occurrence. Coders get reimbursement for any hours they work outside of normal working hours, but the same can not be said for other teams, such as software support specialists or clinical systems analysts. The only reason I can think of for why this is the case is that most of the directors (Frank included) used to be coders themselves, so coders get special treatment. Many compare TPP to a cult, and for good reason. You are expected to pledge your unwavering allegiance to the company and to be a conduit through which the directors can enact their will. In your first week you will be taught more about the company’s idiosyncratic way of working than how to actually be a {insert job role here}. Not only that, but you are told to call others out when they make any sort of slip-up, creating a kind of autocratical informant culture. Certain types of mistake, such as writing bugs or failing to lock up, are rectified by publicly outing yourself to the rest of the company via email. Unsurprisingly, this does nothing to stop such mistakes happening again, but rather just makes people feel bad and causes unnecessary stress. Directors demand employees inform them immediately if they enter into a relationship with another employee. Their reason for making you do so is so they can make sure you don’t work on the same project to avoid distractions, but they expect this level of admission from any and all employees, regardless of how likely it is that their teams will ever work together. Employees have spoken about being interrogated regarding who they are friends with, because fraternising with ex-employees is a big no-no. I imagine the real reason for such an unsettling interest in employees’ personal lives is to have as much ammunition as possible against them once they unwittingly get on the directors’ bad side. Constant surveillance also bleeds into TPP’s way of working: you are encouraged to update your colleagues with what you are doing on a regular basis, as well as how long you think that task will take. While this may seem sensible on paper, in practice it means you’ll need a towel ready to wipe away all the moisture from your teammates breathing down your neck every ten minutes. Due to the very nature of estimation, you’ll essentially be setting your self several miniature deadlines a day and meeting very few of them. Therefore, you’ll go through many work days stressed and finish them feeling like you’ve failed. The atmosphere at TPP is very much that of a sheltered community. Many ex-employees are branded as “toxic” and are slandered in company meetings, with directors encouraging employees to bad-mouth people who were once their colleagues and whom they may still be in contact with. You are flat-out not allowed to socialise with those who used to work at TPP and being suspected of as much is enough to get you fired. If that doesn’t sound like a cult I don’t know what does. I suspect the primary reason that TPP predominantly hires graduates with no prior experience is because established industry professionals would instantly spot all the weird stuff that happens on a daily basis and leave soon after. This lack of context is further amplified by the fact that only a few computers in the office have access to the internet; apparently TPP employees know best when it comes to any questions you may have and searching the internet for answers is a last resort. Much of TPP’s reluctance to change stems from their deluded belief that they are the best company in the world. Frank recently claimed that the company was worth over £1 billion, which appears to be a gross overestimate if one takes a look at their public accounts. Company meetings are often filled with tirades about other organisations and how much worse than TPP they are. This same air of superiority extends to the way customers are treated, often being looked down upon as nuisances for whom only the bare minimum should be done. More evidence of TPP’s we-know-best attitude has surfaced during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. TPP has refused to follow government guidelines, requiring every single employee to come into the office every day, despite being in a sector that is perhaps best suited to working remotely. TPP has never invested in any infrastructure to support working from home and still has no interest in doing so, regardless of potential health risks to its employees. Frank loves to gloat about how much money the company makes, but is clearly not willing to use any of it to improve the lives of their employees past the odd event that looks good on social media. When questioned about their handling of COVID-19 by the Yorkshire Evening Post, TPP gave a limp excuse that staff have to work in the office, as the servers need to be extremely quick. Not only is this just untrue, as I’m sure would be evident to anyone who knows what a server is, but even if it was, surely it wouldn’t require every employee from every team to be in the office? To make matters worse, employees were not allowed to take their lunch break in the office during the pandemic, thus causing unnecessary foot traffic in the local area, potentially endangering its residents. Many of the above points compound on one another to create an environment of unspoken fear. Any day could be your last, as somebody is sacked up to once a week. To drive the point home, here is a list of outlandish reasons people have been sacked from TPP, in no particular order: - Complaining about how something is handled or suggesting that something could be improved - Not divulging aspects of their personal life - Being friends with ex-employees - Looking at Frank wrong - Being uncomfortable around Frank - Showing any sign of weakness during a stressful event - Being suspected of any of the above without any actual evidence For the sake of transparency, I don’t know TPP’s reasons for sacking everyone that they have, but the vast majority that I have spoken to fall under the above categories. Others have been sacked for the reason that they didn’t own up to mistakes or were defensive when questioned about something. While this may be TPP’s most valid reason for dismissal, it usually happens with those who have been employed for less than a year. The oppressive atmosphere does nothing to help such people feel comfortable and firing somebody after one mistake rather than taking action to help them improve is cold and cutthroat. The rest of the cons will cover the more technical aspects of working at TPP as a coder. You will be taught the basics of writing code and several good coding practices, but that's about it. Even the things they do teach you are drip-fed to you as and when you need to know them, so it’s really luck of the draw as to what you’ll pick up in your time at TPP. You will never be given time to just sit and read up on a concept. Apparently teaching you on such a need-to-know basis saves time, but ironically it likely ends up harming more than it helps in the long run, as you’ll constantly be badgering other employees to explain things to you. The codebase itself is ancient and it shows, with many arcane methods that nobody fully understands. This problem will never go away as time is never set aside to give the code the cleaning/refactoring it so desperately needs. Developers are referred to as coders, because you will learn nothing of the actual software development process. Industry standard practices such as automated testing, modern language features, build pipelines, containers, or modern version control are nowhere to be seen. In fact, the very mention of them is enough to get you sacked, as that would amount to suggesting that Frank isn't the utmost authority when it comes to software development. I had to spend about a month studying various aspects of software development to make experience mean anything elsewhere. Ultimately, TPP teaches you how to work at TPP, which unsurprisingly is not a skill that other companies are looking for. I’d recommend staying for around 6 months to get the basics of how to write code professionally and then using that experience to find employment somewhere better. The job security being what it is, staying any longer means risking being unemployed with a severely stunted skill set for the time that you’ve been working.

I think a lot of these cons will become easier to understand if they are framed in the right way, so I'm just going to be blunt and say it: TPP is Frank's personal playground. He is the sole CEO and has full autonomy. On top of this, he is aware that the company needs very few employees to function - he's even bragged as much in whole company meetings. Just a handful of helpdesk staff and a few developers to keep the UK system ticking over is all that's required to keep the money flooding in. Hence no one is indispensable, and anyone can go from his number 1 employee to fired with one "wrong" move. With that said, onto some specifics: • The turnover rate is just not normal, and I have numbers to bear this out. I kept track of the comings and goings of developers, at first just to prove to myself that 'everything was ok', and later out of morbid curiosity when it became clear that they really weren't. I'm not allowed to share these in great detail (against the community guidelines), but I can say that I saw more than 90 developers leave or get fired during my time there. I calculated that the overall retention for software developers over the course of my employment was a mere 32.9%. Anecdotally speaking, it's even worse for other teams - I can only think of about 5 analysts who are still there from when I started - but I don't have precise numbers. I can also say that many developers who left within the last few years were very experienced - many over 5 years, in some cases over 10. This definitely doesn’t add up to a “growing company” (quite the opposite - the coding team was substantially smaller when I left than it was when I started), nor does it fit with the defence of “occasionally we get it wrong, but the majority don’t leave”. Something more is going on here! Why is there no outcry from those still there, then? Well, like all companies, sometimes people *are* fired from TPP legitimately, and the clever thing they do is to get others involved in this process as early in their career as possible. It contributes to an ‘inner circle’ feeling that they propagate in those they want to keep, as well as helping to justify away the horrific leaver rate in that person’s mind. Once you’ve been a part of the decision to fire someone due to legitimate performance concerns, it becomes very easy to assume the same process is being followed in all other cases (it isn’t). Cognitive. Dissonance. • Sexism and racism from the CEO. It does go on, and it does get ignored on a regular basis. People say “oh, that’s just Frank” and shrug it off like he’s making harmless comments, but in doing so they are just covering their backs and becoming part of the problem. It’s particularly bad at office parties once alcohol gets involved, but even outside of these settings inappropriate comments get made and nobody calls him out on it. He made a joke about Harvey Weinstein at a Christmas party – apparently completely missing the point that trivialising abuse towards women is precisely the reason people like that can get away with it for so long. And it’s not just sweeping statements in speeches – I’ve heard vulgar remarks made towards individuals about their appearance, or what he would like to do with/to them, and so on. He will proudly boast about being sexually attracted to many of his employees. The company will retort by asking where are the lawsuits? But as more and more of these stories come to light (Phillip Green, most recently), it’s clear that it isn’t that simple – in most cases, people will simply lack evidence to make it any more than a he-said, she-said scenario. Not to mention the huge social stigma attached with filing a case in the first place – it’s easy to see why it might not happen even under really awful circumstances. • Micromanagement. It is said that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and yet this is exactly what TPP do. There are regular long meetings on such exciting topics as: o Why aren't the coders getting through enough work? o Why are new coders leaving - are they getting enough help/support? The discussions, and ultimate 'solutions', that are put forth in these meetings are always the same and never work. If we want the coders to work faster, they need to be more selfish and less distracted. They just need to "try harder". But, someone might say, I spent my whole morning helping new people on my team - that's ok, right? No, that's not what we discussed - we need to get through more work - that's the most important thing! So now new starters are getting fired or leaving, and we're in the meeting about that. Who has a guilty conscience about not helping new people well enough? About not taking enough time to make sure they understood and were picking things up? Hands are raised. This is unacceptable! New coders must be looked after - that's the most important thing! No one ever clocks the contradiction, or if they do they ignore it, and so the cycle repeats. This is just one example of many. I was talking to some ex-colleagues the other day who mentioned that the "coder work rate" discussions were back in full force and I had to suppress a smile - I really won't miss them! • Outdated coding practises, and a resistance to changing this that comes from the very top. Other reviews would seem to contradict this - they talk a lot about their ethos of “if you don’t like something, change it” - but this at best a lie of omission. It’s something that’s easily believed, because it really does go on (at a small scale) all the time. I would often move to new teams and observe something that I thought should be changed about the way we were working, and it was easy enough to make a change and give it a go. But – and it’s a big but – this stops very suddenly (and quite unpredictably) if you try to do something that Frank disagrees with. This includes most attempts to modernise their coding practices – trying to introduce industry standard approaches such as code reviews or unit testing are simply a no-go, regardless of overwhelming evidence for them being good ideas. Frank cannot stomach them, I think largely because they’re not his own ideas and because he can’t see past his belief that TPP are at the “bleeding edge”. They’re not, for what it’s worth – if you have a computer science background or have done coding before, you will find working at TPP very strange. People who put these ideas forward either back down and admit that they were “mistaken” (bowing down to a mixed bag of logical fallacies and woolly thinking), or they stick to their guns and get fired.