Pros
- Cool office and roof garden - Interesting problems
Cons
When I joined Deliveroo, none of the cons below applied, we had different leadership and the team was high flying. However, many issues arose in 2019 that means I really could never recommend this company for DS now: - The DS leadership really do not know what they are doing. Genuinely some of the directors can't even code in anything but SQL and do not know basic stats!! Worse though, they do not have a strategic focus, meaning DS was not having impact, and is the reason they got hit so hard in the latest round of redundancies compared to other teams. I have felt like they care more about appearing to be good at their jobs than actually caring about their own team or actually driving impact. - I wasn't part of the latest round of redundancies, but I was appalled at the extent to which the group that were made redundant over-indexed on being female or from minority backgrounds. - On the ground level, data scientists seem to just be trying to constantly prove how clever they are (this gets particularly had with the most senior ICs) rather than concentrating on how to drive impact for Deliveroo. I often found people throw around technical terms without properly understanding what they mean, and often confuse others rather than breaking it down to help non-technical stakeholders use the analysis effectively to drive strategy. - The company as a whole used to have an open and transparent culture, similar to big tech. After Mike Hudack (CTO) left, it became very secretive and dominated by those from investment banking backgrounds and their mentality. The c-suite has become extremely reactive, constantly shifting focus between growth and profitability, and also with all the retreats from countries their operated in recently, I don't think they have good long-term strategic direction or growth trajectory - I was lucky in progressing very quickly up the ranks during my time there. However, I know many others who are struggling and have been promised promotions and opportunity by their managers that turned out to be pure lies, which is hugely de-motivating. There has only been one round of promotions in the last 3 years, despite promising them every 6 months. There have been 3 rounds of redundancies over the same period.