Animal Friends Insurance

4.0

13 Jun 2024

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

I started working here this year and was so pleasantly surprised to see so much friendliness amongst my colleagues, towards me and to each other, especially after coming from a toxic culture in my previous place. So far I haven't had a negative experience with anyone, I haven't had the impression of ego, not knowing what they're talking about, etc from any upper management at all. I have a thoroughly pleasant boss. Being a company with fully remote positions, it's hard to build relationships with your colleagues, but so far I've felt that whenever I do meet someone new, they're always keen to get to know you and help you. They do an excellent fortnightly shift option, where you work slightly longer days in return for a day off every 2 weeks. I want this for the rest of my life!! This immediately showed me that they understand the importance of a good work/life balance. Having that extra day off honestly helps me rest so well, motivating me to work more. I haven't seen anyone getting told off for being online slightly late, leaving slightly early, going away for a little bit in the middle of the day. That's really nice to see, again showing they understand the work/life balance, I'd hate to be hounded for accidentally going AFK for 5 minutes. This company does Agile quite well. You get put into a smaller team of developers when you join (with the option to move if you want to), and in this team you'll have testers, developers, scrum masters, business analysts, product managers. There are many cogs moving at AFI yet they manage to do it really well, the system runs quite efficiently. They are very Azure centric, even using ADO for repositories and CI/CD over GitHub, tickets and board over using Jira. A very Microsoft centric stack, which looks great on a CV for .NET developers which the majority of developers here are. They give you a great starting package, I got a laptop, monitor, mouse, keyboard, along with several other nice little goodies. It's nice to see the Animal Friends branding on a lot of stuff, it's a company you can be proud of working for. Only a few months in but so far, I'm really happy. The interview process was fantastic as well. The fastest I had amongst several companies. I knew from the first call that this was where I wanted to work.

Cons

30 minute lunch break is really short! You get 40 minutes with a fortnightly shift but even that is so small. It forced me to make big adjustments with lunch, I can't comfortably go to the shops for stuff to make for lunch, eat it, rest a bit, before getting back into work. I understand doubling that to an hour would be a massive cost to the company, but it really is quite short and was the one major shock I had when starting here. But the 9 day fortnight kind of makes up for it. Onboarding could be improved, it took me weeks to get all the things I needed to do my job, and even now some things are still not set up properly. Managers are understandably very busy and can't spend a whole day getting you set up, but it does make you feel a little bit useless those first couple weeks when you literally can't work because you don't have what you need. Similarly, some of the tech used is quite complicated, hard to understand, especially on the dev ops side of things, which have really strong influences on what you do a software developer, There are things that when run, like a company Kubernetes cluster, that really slow your machine down. They like to have their own little systems, things that all employees can use, but honestly when it slows you down so much you just end up finding these things you need to work with and just getting them running locally yourself, like databases.

Animal Friends Insurance Response

Hi, Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback. We strive to provide a working environment in which our colleagues have access to new opportunities to shape a rewarding career path. We are incredibly passionate about ensuring our colleagues feel valued and, that they are treated fairly and with respect. We value all feedback and learning about our colleagues’ personal experiences as this allows us to gain insight on how we can improve the working environment for everyone at Animal Friends, so thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback. If you do have any further queries or suggestions, these can be sent to the People Team via peopleteam@animalfriends.co.uk. Kind regards, Becky - Animal Friends Insurance

Lovely people and culture, no complaints - Software Engineer Animal Friends Insurance Employee Review

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