Pros
Great location, excellent head of service delivery (a contractor) who knows Lean Agile and puts it to awesome use. Worked with people who wanted to innovate, so I took initiative to improve JIRA experience for users (but manager shot that down).
Kontras
No management to speak of (manager in a different city, met only a handful of times, never worked with him), decades of technical debt (ancient unsupported tools long out of manufacturer support). Old platforms long past their lifespan (Oracle 10g). No training process for tools used (and then blamed for not having received any). They use Adobe Campaign but have butchered in a way that not ever Adobe know what we have done. A simple version update takes 30 days of manual regression testing. No working PC for the 1st 6 weeks. Was assigned a manager who i didn't meet for the 1st month, and rarely thereafter (didn't stop him raising issues with me twice, once for wearing plain t-shirts (chosen to be discrete) with jeans even though others do this, "because Amsterdam do this", and once per tittle tattle for a colleague who was trying to score points). Basically ego and petty points scoring. The data collection is awful because there has been no thought what users' data will do, so you pay for it in the long term. You're a direct marketing agency with terrible data, and the most boring emails ever. Any new startup on the block would kick you in to touch if they had a fraction of the data you have. Your only asset is the data and publishing products, but you squander that by countless duplicate systems which conflict. You are wholly dependent on contractors, some of whom suck. Developers actively saying "we don't need QA". Great attitude, slow clap for that person. His mistakes were evident. Countless pointless intro videos, which are buggy so won't let you mark them as complete. No training for the tools you actually use, aside from what is in people's heads (documentation doesn't reflect the tools). Lots of training offered for tools you don't actually use. Each person in the database has probably got 10 duplicates, from countless duplicate systems and duplicates within the same system. This was data management hell. 10 years previous in a database marketing agency says don't ever, ever do this. Person points scoring and egos abound. Great for a transitional company while you look for other work. Never met HR. On my 1st day there was no HR person (despite being asked to present myself) and never met any HR people thereafter, nor on my exit. My manager was on holiday for the 1st 2 weeks. My work-assigned buddy was trying his best by massively overworked (read The Phoenix project to get an idea of what was happening to him. He was Brent in the book). Manager didn't even discuss my exit. Exit interview was with a contractor. BA element of my role was consistently pulled away from me (understandably) so i could work on business as usual tasks, which progressed at glacial pace due to technical debt. QA role on projects the same thing happened, so wasn't on any projects despite a long list of projects with impossible timeframes. Was bored from start to finish in my 4 months there.
