Very Talented Developers with Terrible Management and Horrible Review Systems
Pros
- The developers that work at this company are incredible, perhaps the most talented pool I've ever had the pleasure of working with. - The lowest level of management (for example, direct product managers of a small team) work very hard and protect their teams well from corporate issues. - The company really has a no-blame culture. If you mess something up, the post-mortem feels more like a genuine get together and fix together, not a blame game. - I usually find diversity and inclusiveness programs to be useless or very fake, but at the NS they actually take this seriously. I've never seen an employer be so open for deaf, blind, disabled, or people with learning disabilities/cognitive disabilities.
Cons
- The NS offers developers no path forward. Initiative and the performance of next role tasks (such as a medior doing senior work, or a senior doing lead work) is punished with a performance review system that actively discourages succes. The company will, after you've sacrificed a lot and tried to create good products for customers, tell you that everyone is evaluated at the same level, offer you no promotion, and use horrible reasons such as "you make a lot of money for your age" and "our rules say we can't promote you despite your great performance" to deny you ways forward, even if your direct leads are vouching for your succes and recommend a promotion. - Performance reviews are done by HR professionals who don't work with you, and even after you deliver everything they require, they still go out of their way to create more useless work with the goal of not allowing you to grow further. - Upper and board-level management make some of the most incompetent decisions that I've ever seen at a large company. Projects that are very profitable and provide great value to our operations staff and customers are often cut in terms of budget or remove entirely at the favor of projects that are operationg at a loss, don't work at all, or don't make any sense. Budget cuts will happen randomly, and at places that make no sense. - The NS sells itself as a low bureacracy organisation, but ironically it is filled to the brim with it and it gets in the way of innovation and cost-cutting/optimization tasks. - The organisation is filled with downright useless jobs. Development teams exist that have more scrum and process masters than developers, and it actively harms ways forward. The IT sector of the company has more consultants and managers than developers.
