Low grade work
I joined Readify thinking I'd get to work on the better projects, gaining lots of good hands on experience and having above average job satisfaction.
It is true that my employment contract said I had 23 days a year to spend on personal development (PD). However, you only get this time in between assignments, when there is no work for you anyway (I had about 3 weeks in 2 years). They do send you to a few conferences in Australia a year which you nominate.
The problem with the PD was that I was never given assignments where I got to apply my new knowledge. Gaining new knowledge is nice, but if you don't apply it in real projects, it is of little use.
By far my main concern was the low quality of the actual assignments. I learned far less than at previous employers. Job satisfaction was far lower as well. I often wondered why the client hired supposedly the best of the best for the work I was doing. By way of illustration, here are my assignments during my 2 years at Readify:
1) Bug fixing and some minor additions to a system that had been under development for about a year.
2) Various additions to 2 simple Umbraco based web sites.
3) Building a simple site to access an MS SQL Server database. Talked the team lead into letting me work with the product owner to design the database schema. That was interesting, but lasted only 3 weeks.
4) Bug fixing for most of a year on a large banking site, plus writing some simple screens. Was extended a number of times by Readify without warning.
5) Bug fixing for a few weeks to get an application ready to go live, after it had been under development by others (no longer on site) for about a year.
6) Bug fixing and enhancements to a 2 year old line of business system for about half a year.
Throughout all this, I became more and more concerned that on my resume I had no highlights to show for my time at Readify, while for previous employers that was never a problem. I was standing still professionally and job satisfaction was low. Talked with my managers repeatedly, who listened sympathetically, but with no result.
In the end, I contacted some recruiters and 4 days later had a contract involving a 50% pay increase. For my current client I am now redesigning/rebuilding part of a large web application into a single page app using a JavaScript framework. I'm learning a lot, job satisfaction is much higher and I get to use my creativity and skills again.
Low pay
From talking with other developers and recruiters, I found that I could have earned 20% more than at Readify at other companies in a permanent role. My current contract pays 50% more. Money isn't everything, but that is a big gap.
Culture
Firstly, I found that the vast majority of Readify people are nice and intelligent, and technically a bit better than average.
However, many of the more vocal senior technical people (teams leads and up) seem to suffer from a curious combination of hubris and lack of experience, causing them to push ideas that look good in theory but are terrible in practice.
Writing code comments is actively discouraged, instead you have to write self-documenting code. Factoring code into separate methods to facilitate reuse is another no-no, instead when someone wants to reuse your code later on, they then have to refactor your code. This was brought home to me when I was told off at length by a Readify team lead for writing one line of comments in a necessarily tricky bit of code. No fun at all.
In practice, this means that developers don't document anything, not with comments, not with code. And instead of refactoring, you get a lot of copy-pasting, because that is less risky and easier. The result is untold frustration for developers who have to maintain Readify code, and increased development costs and decreased software reliability for the client.
