Pros
The people in the trenches are great to work with and some of the projects and clients are really interesting, challenging and rewarding. This is not the experience of many though.
Cons
There are some deep and fundamental issues with Platform45 that has left me very concerned over the past year or so. Leadership has grown increasingly toxic and chaotic. The company has gone through multiple so-called re-orgs with role reallocations and restructurings that changed nothing and only resulted in nobody really knowing who they report to anymore. When people make mistakes (and let's face it, everyone will make a mistake sooner or later), the dressing-down includes reminders how this mistake is wiping out good work done by another team on another project, and how this mistake is placing the company in a difficult position. Nothing about providing support or assistance to rectify the mistakes and prevent them from happening again. People's experience, qualifications or abilities are often brought into question semi-publicly when things go wrong. When the company is facing difficulty, it's the employees that get blamed for not "engaging" or "caring" enough for client projects. This blaming/ranting is done during open company wide forums, where only generics are shared, leaving everyone wondering if it's them or someone else who'se to blame for the problems. Everyone is led to believe the company is on the edge of solvency and the smallest mistake can result in everything coming crashing down. Leadership has adopted all the bad parts of an agency culture: some people (usually non-maker roles such as QA, PO PM etc) are placed on multiple projects at the same time, where they are expected to split their time between these projects. This is often done on fixed-price projects in an attempt to save money. There is a general allergy for roles who do not work on client projects (i.e. their work generates revenue), and when people are benched (which is a common occurence in the agency model), this is often met with negativity and scorn. Many projects are fixed price/scope/time, with little to no up-front analysis done before contracting, and even less margin built in afterwards. Not a single one of these projects have ended on time or within budget, yet the company continues to sign them on, hoping for a different result each time. There is little to no technical leadership in the organisation, and subsequently don't expect any meaningful career development for developers. Some projects have leads that actually care, and count yourself lucky if you land on one of these. This is the minority though, and most other projects is a veritable wild west of tech stacks and architectures, based on the whim of whomever committed the first code. The recruitment and appointment process has also completely broken down recently, with a few appointments who have not lasted beyond the probation period. There is no managerial support for non-makers, such as POs, PMs, QA and so on. These people are mostly expected to "do their thing" and when it does not work, the blame game is played as highlighted above. I will note that things might be improving in this department, with the recent appointment of an experienced general manager and project director. These roles are poisoned chalices though, and I will not be holding my breath. The CEO has bet the farm on AI, for better or for worse, and genuinely believes that AI will solve all the issues that we are experiencing at the moment. He will sometimes submit unsolicited drive-by massive PRs to projects that are AI generated, doesn't work, and require the team's full attention to debug and get integrated into the project. When sprint goals are missed, then the answer "we spent the whole week debugging the CEO's AI-generated code which did not work" is not accepted as a good enough reason. Junior developers are given an AI coding assistant and assigned solo on real projects that real clients are paying for. Even non-developers are solo vibe-coding on real projects that real clients are paying for. The company is taking on dubious equity deals with companies of no pedigree or product only because they have AI in the name. I am not an AI sceptic, and I believe that this tech will genuinely revolutionise our industry. But Platform45's approach is slap-dash, lacking any strategy or thought and is setting up a lot of people for failure. Some projects and their clients are so toxic that it has resulted in multiple resignations. Leadership is willing to endure staff resignations as long as the revenue on the project continues and there are bodies to throw at the project. From the outside it appears as if there is a lot of toxicity and bullying coming down from leadership on to the management team, and this has resulted in several resignations over the past couple of years, specifically the project director role, which has changed hands 3 times in the past two years. Platform45 is on a downward spiral and the numbers show it: the 2024 and 2025 staff turnover rate is roughly 50%. Every negative review on Glassdoor is true and I find it very alarming that there are some negative reviews that I have seen on here in the past, that have since been deleted. I would not reccomend Platform45 as a good place to work.
