Pros
- The CEO is really smart and awesome - It's a big american company with an office in Dublin, Ireland so you can have the chance to get in touch with people with all around the world. - The view from the 6th floor of the building is nice and also the snack program and the employees clubs are a nice bonus to make your day more enjoyable. - Most colleague are friendly and there is a lot of flexibility in managing your time
Kontras
- The CEO has stopped to oversee the hiring a long time ago, and the quality upper and lower management of the Dublin office is really poor (with very limited exception like Chris Byrne) - Tons of big policies and procedure for everything, with several levels of approval. They clearly don't trust their employees and they want to get managers involved in every decision, even the technical ones. Most of the policy are so generic that basically leaves a huge discretionary power in the hands of a really poor management. - The company is always saying that they care about you, but it's more true if you are a manager. We are all equal only when it comes to the snack program or a spot in the car park. If you are a individual contributor, you are just a resource to be allocated the a project/team every few months/weeks as they like. - The structure is very vertical, with a manager every 3/4 people and multiple managers from different organizations with different okr, policy, procedures to handle a single team. - They call the management "leadership", but it's just a word, they are not leading anything, they are not providing example, guidance, mentoring or coaching. They only care about their goals/okr/objectives and not about you or your career. They tell you that you career is in your hands, and they mean it, literally since they cannot care less. - There are no quantitative goals to measure your contributions/productivity and no clear path/checklist to get a promotion. It's only based on your ability to sell yourself with smoke and mirrors and become friends of the upper management and not with actual quality deliverables to the customers. - They are running a career check-in every year as an HR compliance exercise, but it's just a one way presentation. First you present you achievement, than you will be given the management review, unrelated to your presentation and with compensation/promotion package predetermined . - If you are already a good friends of the upper management, you can be promoted every 6/12 months, without having to prove anything and you can also get you friend and family hired in senior roles. They call this connections, and they really value it, but I prefer to use another name. - If you have an irish passport, you will get probably an higher level in the company given the same level of experience in the industry, so apply for one before joining the company. They are proud of having a mix of people from all around the world in the Dublin office, but almost all of them are individual contributor. Probably in Ireland there are a lot of managers and very few developer, tester, analyst, etc. It's clearly a coincidence. - There is a toxic culture where you are forced to comply and pretend that everything is awesome, if you try to point out a problem, you will become the problem since you clearly do not understand their magnific work and instead of fixing the problem, they will focus on explaining to you why you are wrong. - If you are unlucky enough to work with xpresso for 1-2 years, your career in the real word is ended. They believe they have created (acquired) a powerful proprietary language/system that it's ten of years ahead of everything. Even if it's an interesting technical solution, it's clearly limited and there is no proper tooling to support the code development. There is a huge ecosystem of plugins written by devs in their spare time to improve the gaps of the language, because the company does not care to have the xo team spend time to improve the dev experience. They are just totally blind and full of themselves
