Good Atmosphere, But Can't Pay - Software Developer Luminous Group Employee Review

The people are friendly enough. Decent and practical hiring process. Career advancement exists but only because of the churn rate of people in the middle levels of the company leading to default "promotions".

I've never had a such high output as a developer yet been treated so poorly for it. When I changed jobs I increased my pay by 64% and the perceived workload halved. I went through 3 direct managers in my last year here because they kept leaving for better pastures. Not that it matters because upper management steamrolled team planning and directly micromanaged every task that took longer than a day anyway. And if seniors weren't reviewing my code due to being swamped themselves, it was my fault for not chasing them hard enough to close the tickets. I had heart rate spikes over 130BPM getting on calls with a handful of individuals, including "employee number 1". This job made me lie in my bed and cry on some mornings. They are beholden to own customer, namely Aramco, who demand extra unscoped work outside of the contracted work package because they are too financially important. Luminous makes claims about features being complete when they are still in prototype phase so that they can sell more contracts which they don't have the resource to finish in time. When deadlines were close of missed (I can't recall many cases of being comfortably on time) good development standard practices would disintegrate. The bottom line is the pay is very poor for what they demand. Luminous markets itself as a software as a service company but pays like a D-tier mobile games company and demands dedication of devs at an A-tier games company.

- The people there are great, very welcoming and fantastic office environment. - The work is interesting on both the XR and Platform sides of the business - Uses up to date technologies

- Enforced Office days meant basically taking a pay cut without the pay cut. There were no leeway or negotiations on the matter either. - They seem to be losing staff quite a bit recently