No Dev Culture, Dev treated poorly, Doom and Gloom
Pros
Try new things, learn some modern tech, some good people, Canadian health benefits are okay. I'd consider working here as a stepping stone to get some experience and save some money, if you can't find a better place to work. The subject matter can be interesting but it's rare to be taught much about it.
Cons
Low pay, toxic culture, no trust from the C level, developers are expendable, under-staffed design and QA teams, MANY LEAD/DEVELOPERS ALL JUST QUIT IN 2021. Developers were typically hired between $50-60k. Seniors were $60-70k. Leads were $70k-90k. only 1 person had $90k All in Canadian Dollars. In 2021 the company went public. A week before that, they let go 1-2 developers from almost EVERY team. The developers were not warned. Those people were let go in the morning via a meeting right after they started work for the day. They were just erased from slack and email, and no one was told what happened. The company never put out any messaging that explained why they did it, nor did they address employee concerns or show any emotion. In fact the only email that hinted at it, was from CTO, who posed it all like a positive situation where nothing but blue skies and new opportunities were ahead. This obviously was a brutal hit to employee morale. It displayed to the developers how expendable we were, and that if we were let go, no remorse would even be showed. The company typically pays people as little as possible. New grads from the University of Lethbridge were historically hired at low salaries and then the pay was only rarely increased if they were able to find a promotion, of which there were few opportunities. After letting so many people go, and many people quitting, they are now trying to hire people to fill in again. This will undoubtedly cost more money because new hires are not going to accept the low pay of the people who were let go. It's depressing seeing new people, with less experience, come in and get paid more than you. The Lethbridge office was under-resourced, lacked proper cleaning, everything was generally cheap. You had to drive on a bumpy gravel road to get to the office. ALL because it was cheapest way to get a building. It was one in the Industrial section, working next to trucking companies. TOXIC CULTURE LACKING TRUST C-levels are not experienced or knowledgeable about anything tech related. In the past, if they didn't like an estimate, they might outsource the work to a contracting company, which ends up going over-budget and costing much, much more and just resulted in unmaintainable code in the long-run. But at least they didn't have to listen to their own people, right? C-levels are largely unaware of how bad it was because they immediately focused on their next projects and left this to eventually fall back into the lap of the development teams. Developers are almost in a competition to push themselves and give low estimates because everyone is under unneeded crunch caused by poor planning. The company has never actually put adequate resources into planning and design of their products. For product design/planning the opted to hire from within. This might be okay, but not when you take a farmer and make them into a product owner. They might know the domain but they know nothing about creating products. This would seem obvious to most people but not Farmers Edge CEO or CTO. Just because you can drive a car, doesn't mean you can run a team that designs and builds cars. The CTO has a particularly bad reputation about being ignorant of anything tech-related. People expect him to not understand the context of any meetings he's in. People expect him to come down heavy handed and punish people for mistakes. Buzzwords + fake it til' you make it + playing politics + buddy buddy with CEO. Expect to be given next to no requirements, then expected to give accurate estimates that you may be held accountable for. AKA "Tell me how long it will take to accomplish this "magic thing" and your estimate better fit this timeline that my boss was told by his boss". Then, "why isn't this done? You gave a rough estimate with no info and I thought it was accurate and now I have to beg my boss for my time because my boss is a nightmare". The development side of the company is a shadow of its former self. Currently being pushed out of Canada and into the USA. The culture used to be good but the people who created it are all gone. Most people who are left, are new and don't really know about these issues in the company yet. Around 20 developers have left during 2021, including most of the lead developers. Massive amount of brain drain has happened and it's unlikely that the remaining people have any idea what knowledge was lost. Also the company is trying to have bad reviews taken down but the bad reviews are true...so? Also please note recent 5 star reviews with barely any information that were added as a reaction to the bad reviews.
