After a very short time, the veil quickly fell and I began to see some harsh realities. The technical management of the project I worked on was very unprofessional, in ways I won’t go into detail on and as a result, was largely ineffective. It’s my hope that the stress of the project was the reason for the unprofessionalism, and that this isn’t normal practice, however I feel if the company were able to manage their staffing better, the lead would have been able to effectively delegate and shift work appropriately onto myself and other techs in the team.
Another pain point from this was that the need was felt to bring along a whole mess of poorly engineered boilerplate code that was almost impossible to wade through and mostly did not fit the needs of the project and became more of a constant battle than a useful toolset. If you respect the technology that you use and like to feel proud in the quality of the solutions that you engineer, you will be at odds here.
Aside from this, there are also problems on the accounts side. I never received an invoice payment on time. Having to constantly chase them, mostly to radio silence regarding reasons for delay was tiresome. It is a shame that a large, respected company such as Unit9 would not hold their end of a contract in terms of this and in the end, it felt exploitative.
My advice to anyone looking at contracting or joining on as a full time staff member as a technical person with Unit9, would be to avoid it if possible. The level of stress, poor management of teams and finances and also potential disrespect from technical leads as a flow on from this mismanagement are just not worth the hassle. If you are tossing up between contracts or jobs to undertake, take the alternative. If you are in a position where you must take it, quickly line up alternatives.
