Not recommend for long term work, recommend if you want a great start into IT.
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
The employer is genuinely nice and fun guy when work topics are not involved. He is also a very helpful person and if you need help you can definitely count on him.
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
I truly don't like how little employer cares about the quality of the produced code. Yea, sure it works, but to work with that is a nightmare. And a nightmare is a "refactor" word for an employer. Why would you rewrite the thing, when you can develop new feature in that time?
Verbesserungsvorschläge
I don't really know, for me there was a little too much pressure on new features and too little focus on testing and overall in quality of the produced code.
I think someone who would work between the employeer and the developers would be beneficial as the employer now can focus on the contact with the customer, setting its requirements and passing it down to that person. That person can now handle meetings with the developers, handle sprints and so on. There is no need for the employer to be involved in technical stuff or how the app architecture is constructed.
Refactor old code, it is truly terrible to work with (it was okay a decade ago) or even put the service into "maintenance mode", fix only critical bugs and create brand new version from scratch using modern technologies and tools.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
The atmosphere was great and the colleagues were awesome and super helpful. Nothing bad could be said about them
Kommunikation
Communication in general was awful. The requirements, if there were any, rarely were clear. In general you would get a task and immediately go ask questions to know anything about the task. If you were lucky you could get some details, but very often you got nothing as the communication with the person was unreliable since it had too much stuff on its head (you could easily split its work into at least 3 other job positions). Often you could just get a random task with meaningless title and no description, ask about that and wait days for response. Quite often the was a situation that you were informed about an important meeting with the customer on which we want to show the Feature XYZ (which is far from being finished and the meeting organisator knows about that perfectly well) a day or two before actual meeting.
The communication with the colleagues: Simply awesome.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
Absolutely awesome, it was a great pleasure and honor to work with them. There were many talented people to learn from.
Work-Life-Balance
Flexible working hours were great and no one can deny that. If necessary it is expected from you to work over hours (happened multiple times) sometimes to really late hours and sometimes during the weekends.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
In general you want to avoid conflicts with the superior at all costs. Any critique sent in his direction will turn on his self-defence mode in which he absolutely stops listening you. In response he will use his speech abilities to try to convince you that you are not right but he is. Sometimes I had the feeling that superior is detached from the reality, by expecting really inexperienced people to create/fix something at the day one in code that is ancient using libraries that no one uses in a modern times. Another example, I pointed out a very serious problem with the feature and in response I heard "The problem exists only in your mind" and as far as I know the problem persists to this day. The superior sometimes made weird decisions, like buying digital board that almost no one used, placing it in the office and removing the standard whiteboard (which was perfecty fine and worked far better than this digital thing) from another room. Just why? And who asked for that?
Interessante Aufgaben
The tasks were really interesting and the variety of them was large. There was always something exciting to do.
Gleichberechtigung
Everyone was treated equally and with respect
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
In general the employee retention was really low so there were only few people that worked there for more than 5 years and even less that you could call a senior. Long serving colleagues were really helpful and I personally believe that they were undervalued and not respected enough.
Arbeitsbedingungen
The computers were fine and problems with ordering something more powerful rarely occurred. The rooms were bright, nicely illuminated and quiet in general. There were coffee machines for employees to use. Lots of snacks. In the summer it could be a little bit to hot (no AC in the office)
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
I would say the environmental awareness was quite high. The office was basically paperless. The paper was almost forbidden. A little bit more effort could be put into saving power (leaving rooms with lights turned on) I guess.
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
The wages were absolutely fine for starters/juniors and that's it. There was no transparency in the payments. The bonuses existed (e.g. christmas bonus) but the value of such was never known and probably was calculated on some arbitrary metrics, if at all. You could try get the raise, but it was generally a hard process.
Image
The company's image was perceived as innovative and ambitious.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
TLDR: The more you work there the more harmful it becomes for you.
There is a character limit so I will focus on the most important thing for me - personal development. It is profoundly disappointing. Don't get me wrong. The diversity is great but there is only so much you can learn. The QA was, straight up, basically non existing. No tests, no code reviews, nothing. You can create something, a feature, a fix, a piece of code, anything and you will not get any feedback about how good or bad it is. The only feedback you'll get is: It works, or not. You can create something really, really, REALLY dumb, but if it works then everything's fine and it goes to production. No one checks what you created, there's no one who could tell you "Hey listen, the thing you did, it works but maybe there is a better way of doing that, try this and that next time" or "Hey! The code you want to merge, it has a security vulnerability, you shouldn't do this and that. Please fix it". You can repeat the same dumb mistake over, and over, and over again, and you will never find out that the thing you did is wrong. After years, what do you represent? E.G. 5 years+ of experience and code with junior mistakes