Bionic Reviews

The list is endless. I could probably write several books as to how bad this company is but will summarize in short. Where to begin. Simply the worst company in every way shape and form. I worked here the best part of a year in the sales team. If you're looking for money and progression as a young sales graduate, you've come to the wrong place. When you start you will undergo well below par training from the 'business savings team leader' about the products to pitch. After 1 week you will then be forced to cold call (unqualified) leads in excess of 400 times a day. They have a system called 'wrap time' which allows the entire sales teams and team leaders to see your average time taken in between each call. You are not allowed to average more than 40 seconds in between each call at the end of the day. Even if you are exceeding targets you will still have documented discussions with your team leaders as to why you are 'under performing' if you're wrap time averages more than 40 seconds in between each call, you have made less than 450 dials a day / you'r talk time is below 5 hours. Targets are to be met quarterly through out the day. This means you are forced to stand up for the entire day while pitching until you are on 'run rate' to hit your target. In the junior broker role you are only taught one thing - to read the poorly written sales script word for word. If you do not read the script word for word you are given a documented discussion. I worked out how pitch properly and hit / exceed targets without reading the script and I was still scrutinized. You are taught to treat the customers like crap by never letting them hang up the phone, forcing them to do things they don't want and objection handling them until they essentially hang up. One colleague was so corrupted by this system he was told by the customer he had a recent grievance but carried on with the pitch anyway - the customer threatened to sue the company. Even if you are far exceeding your targets the team leaders will harass you to keep going. This is not a role for the faint-hearted. During my time I have seen dozens of people leave within the first few weeks (even days) because they cannot handle the stress and high pressure or have been sacked by the company. The company will advertise the position as a role paying 18-40k. No matter how hard you work, exceeding all targets (which I did) you will not earn anywhere near the upper end of this bracket. The pay structure for such a high pressure sales role is abysmal. It takes several months to start earning commission. In my 6th month the commission structure was changed to make earning commission severely more difficult than it previously was. I had put in the same amount of work when the commission structure changed and I had lost thousands of pounds. Literally thousands. The sales tactics are mis-leading and unethical. You are taught to lie through your teeth to the customer either to achieve a KPI of transferring a call 'live transfer' or processing a sale. You are taught to read objection scripts if the customer objects such as "I am busy / not interested / use a broker" I have never seen such rampant mis-selling and bad treatment of customers in any company. One example, the company introduced a product called "Do it for you" in which the company organizes the future electricity and gas contracts for the customers. However the scheme is pitched and designed in a way to rip off customers putting them on overcharged energy rates while roping them into long term contracts. For most employees the motivation to continue working is to not be hassled by the demanding bosses and work just hard enough not to get sacked. The company culture is shocking - a very much step on other people's toes culture to get to the top. Some people will stop at nothing, what were once friends may turn into a student - teacher situation. Drug use in the office is rife. Dress is far too casual. People turn up to work in dirt stained tracksuits - highly unprofessional and embarrassing considering the office is in the Loyds Chambers building in Central London where everyone dresses smart apart from the employees at Make It Cheaper. The companies idea of progression is mind boggling. The idea is to progress from the junior role and move into a product sales team where you will actually be closing the deals. However once you progress (1 in 20 statistically get promoted to a product team others leave or get sacked) you will not even get a pay rise - in fact again I had lost out in more money again because the commission structure was even harder to achieve than in the junior role.

* Unfortunately the company suffers from serious negligence when it comes to technology and how to manage a dev team. Some devs are always busy fire fighting and reacting to problems, and no time is taken for post-mortems to prevent those sorts of things happening again. Urgent work is often thrown at the team with very little time given to plan, design properly and spec out a sound technical solution. * Technical debt is completely neglected and shoved under the rug in a massive cover up attempt. Many developers agree that there's increasing business risk as a result of the temporary hacks and patches being applied to the various systems all for the reason that everything has to be released urgently. It's tragic when most of the developers on the team want to do things properly but are seriously constrained by the amount of pressure put onto them by the business. The result is a complete lack of morale and a feeling of guilt that you've written shoddy code that will eventually become a long term business risk to satisfy a group of stake holders who don't understand the implications of the poorly designed code you've just written * Code reviews are a joke, every time an issue is raised in the review process the response is "Yeah we should fix that, but Marketing need this right now!!!". So hack upon hack upon hack is released to production and no one cares enough (or has the time) to go back and fix them. The result is compounded where features then take longer, so more pressure is added and more mess accumulates. The end result is ultimately a death spiral and a loss of competitiveness. Management should understand this before its too late * Depending on which team you work on (there are two dev teams, Product and Tech Dev), the office can be extremely noisy and distracting. Some devs are fortunate, but others have been placed in very distracting locations, with noise, loud pumping music and crowds of people frequently passing them by and resulting in a lack of focus. This is a result of the lack of understanding on the needs of knowledge based workers. Sales staff thrive on this sort of high energy environment, but roles that require more in depth thinking and silence do not. * Very backwards and closed minded when it comes to remote working. Senior management are very much against it and hate the idea of not being able to physically see their employees. Despite struggling to hire, management are extremely hostile to the idea and refuse to even listen to the potential benefits. This is a symptom of a much more disturbing problem whereby developers are not being evaluated on their code and on the quality of the products they're releasing. Instead devs are rewarded for talking the loudest, saying "the right things" in meetings or releasing very fast at the expense of long term maintenance. To reward developers for speed is a short term business strategy and seriously risks long term profitability. * Countless lies in the job descriptions. Free massages at desks don't exist, free vending machine days will happen once a year if you're lucky and there's no quiet areas that are mentioned in the job spec. * 20 days annual leave is way below industry average of 25 days.