I think there's an attempt at figure fiddling going on here with some of the recent 5 star reviews painting a very sunny picture of the Belfast situation. Questionable management practices would support that.
This company and the Belfast office in particular have plummeted from where they used to be in pretty much every way. Morale is rock bottom for the remaining staff that have been here any length of time and many of the reasons have been well covered in previous reviews but I'll add my 2 cents on why things are so bad.
The Belfast leadership change in mid 2019 led to some drastic - and truly awful - changes to the culture and working environment of the office. It was such a noticeable shift in company priorities away from employees which resulted in huge staff turnover at the start of 2020 - more people left in one month than in the previous 2 years the company had existed in Belfast which says a lot and the attrition of senior staff ever since is absolutely absurd. All the media articles and headlines about BV going on a hiring spree and expanding rapidly fail to recognise how much of these new hires are just back fill.
New management have shown themselves to be very shady, untrustworthy and outright ignorant on numerous occasions. Treating staff as easily replaceable cattle with blatant lies told and an approach of trying to make things look good rather than addressing underlying problems/concerns is not the way to run an office anywhere but into the ground.
Hiring replacement staff that management were good friends with in previous companies (regardless of technical ability/experience) and promotions seem arbitrary with decisions made without considering actual expertise or the work done by others. There has also been some really strange decisions to axe (or at least speed up the leaving of) high performing staff which can only be attributed to personal reasons which is very, very concerning. Being good friends with the boss shouldn't translate to such obvious favouritism time after time. This is all just adding to the list of problems with the blind leading the blind on many teams. Given the knowledge that has left the company most teams don't really know what they're working on at depth, why things have been done the way they have or the direction of most projects - project handover has always been problematic at BV (even before recent staff losses).
Greenfield development has all but vanished in Belfast. This is largely because Austin engineering efforts are being moved to Belfast to reduce salary overhead so expect to work on legacy projects. Even changes like these are fraught with issues caused by management with people in Austin seemingly told last minute they were out (i.e. handover made even worse). Presumably things are heading for the office in India eventually even though we're being told otherwise in Belfast - Austin were told the same about Belfast before they got axed and *a lot* of people are being hired out there. The projects being inherited from Austin are generally old technology wise and there are only one or two projects in the office that you'd actually want to work on. Best choose wisely at the start as people generally don't move around much since the knowledge you have of a project is all the company has and they'd prefer you stay where you are.
Forget about the 20% time if that's even mentioned to you as part of hiring process (think they're officially phasing it out anyway because personal development is no longer relevant to the company anymore I guess?). It was definitely a great benefit of the company but axed shortly after new management took over.
There used to be culture of really celebrating things but there's no longer any recognition at all of the work done by people and giving individuals praise used to be a weekly thing (things are very chaotic but we should still be trying to celebrate something from time to time to revive morale). Do management just not see who's doing what??
Austin leadership is a bit of a mess too but like all areas of the company turnover is high so you'll probably see a new name every time you actually encounter/hear of them. The new CEO seems sound but probably won't have any impact on day to day for a good while and he really needs to get a grip on Belfast. Belfast management seem to really be trying to appease Austin leadership more than anything which is why I wouldn't put it past them to push 'friends' to give good reviews on here as they've done this in the past with employee satisfaction surveys. If the metrics show an improvement, things are better right?
TLDR: Senior management have big egos and have made a conscious effort to eradicate the old culture of BV that made it so great. Belfast office is too exhausting to work in for all the wrong reasons.
