Pros
Team was good. Nice people, although not always available for help and most seemed pretty miserable. Wage is top-tier for northern companies. (Although this doesn't matter much anymore as remote working has forced northern companies to try and match the south).
Kontras
Your monitored by upper-management 24/7 with 'active track' so they can watch your screen while you work from home. Your forced to remote into a pc on there site, meaning your typing and work speed is therefore limited by wifi connection, if your having problems with your wifi they won't care, and just think your lazy. While your offered a '1 day a month in office' contract, your will be attacked by upper management to come into the office as much as possible. more of a hassle if anything. The code sucks, or at least the codebases i worked on did. All legacy php, everything thrown in one class, horrible to work with. makes work harder. and is about 30 years behind in terms of modern tech standards. You will be given a windows pc which is ripped straight out of a kids primary school and all 2nd hand hardware. (My keyboard has the stands on the back ripped off with some keys letters missing [Still had the key, just faded off]) Says 9-5, but you will be required to be online at 8:45 to join a scrum meeting outside of your listed hours. Like. WHY!? Too many scrum meetings, you don't need a daily update on every small issue. that as well you have another weekly meeting with your top manager about your progress. Like christ. give it a break. got told it was because the devs wanted it but from the people i spoke too this is a direct lie. They offer minimum benefits for days off, Holiday pay, and parking, you can't park unless you've been there 5 years. you'll be forced to park 10 mins away and walk. You can't take holiday anytime you want, you need to give 2 weeks notice. YOUR SPECIFICATION Sheets are horrendous. You'll be given a spec to work towards, however, everything they write on it is open to interpretation and you can't just tackle each issue how you want. upper management wants it all done in a specific way, so you'll find yourself on calls more often than not trying to figure out exactly what they need. (I KNOW This is standard practice for most dev work, but at one call, it was over the top and the specifications are all rushed out). you HAVE to get the information otherwise you'll get a testing 'failure' with nothing to do with the code being broken, just being you didn't do exactly what they asked. and if you get these 'failures' your manager will be grilling you and talking to you like your a child and will treat you like awfully. Honestly, if you're still reading this, one call insurance is the last company you should work for as a dev. I warn any future devs on going for this as i haven't even listed out all my main issues. Here's a quick list. 1. Uninspiring issues 2. Horrible managers. 3. Horrible codebase 4. Horrible issues. 5. Horrible equpiment 6. Horrible support. 7. horrible benefits. 8. 1995 mentality towards work 9. forced into the office 10. No trust for employees 11. horrible tech stacks with no sight of improvement (This is different if you work on the better projects) 12. no sympathy. 13. forced to go to socials(Forced as in, you will be given the cold shoulder if you're not turning up all the time to events) 14. DON'T WORK ON CLAIMS It hard to be motivated for a job that gives you nothing, works awful, and its not that inspiring or innovative. if you want to survive in this industry you need to find somewhere that keeps up to date with tech. and holds its morals with what it gives its workers and the environments they create. About a month in i'd already lost all motivation to try, I knew i'd made a mistake with the company, I tried to continue to get motivated but if the work was not there and it doesn't click you'll never improve properly. Its easier as a junior to turn up as you don't know what to expect from a developer job. but the second you change to a better tech focused company you'll realise how backwards OneCall Really is.
