Pros
M3 MacBook as a work machine, that's about it
Cons
BT Group is without a doubt the worst employer I have ever encountered. I joined in July of 2024 and from the very start the red flags started to appear. Prior to my first day I was not told where to go nor who to meet, and had to pry this information out of my reluctant and uninterested line manager. On my first day I was escorted upstairs by a member of staff who handed me a laptop and then went off to go do his own work. I was not shown around the office, not introduced to anyone, and not told what to do. I didn't even get a safety briefing telling me the fire procedures, evacuation protocols etc. This continued for the entire first week as I could not even get my laptop set up correctly, having to call the internal support line for hours on end. When I eventually did get set up, I learned that none of the people within my team were actually located in the same office as me, and I was not introduced to anyone external to my team, which was incredibly isolating. There is absolutely zero camaraderie at BT, not a single person messaged me over the 6 months I was there to have a chat or a catch-up. Nobody uses their cameras for remote meetings, and they barely pay attention nor contribute. BT rely heavily on outsourced contractors in India, which completely fractures the teams when one half are 5 and a half hours ahead of the other. Opportunity for collaboration, which is a crucial part of a functional development team, is minimal because of this. My mandatory three office days per week consisted of me sitting in an empty office in isolation. When I finally left BT this week, nobody even bothered to say goodbye... The work itself is nauseatingly boring and menial. I was brought in to work on payment APIs which was sold as exciting work integrating with payment providers etc. In reality this boiled down to occasionally adding a new field to existing solutions. The infrastructure is incredibly bloated and dysfunctional, and documentation is fractured across countless teams and domains. I never had full access to the documentation I required to complete my work, and received zero training on this other than being told to "read the docs" (which I did not have access to). This is not helped by the constant shifting of teams and company structure. Pull requests on certain projects require approval from up to four different specific individuals, who are either too busy or just don't care enough to review your code. I had one change take an entire MONTH to get reviewed after hours and hours chasing up these specific people. The final straw for me was when my manager was pressuring me to take over the team from another employee who had been with the company for around 16 years. He expected me to just "connect with him" and magically acquire enough knowledge to be the technical lead, which was ridiculous. My manager's demenour in general was both apathetic and condescending, everything a manager should not be. He would constantly butt-in in meetings and talk over people to ask irrelevant questions and drag the conversation to the wrong places. His style of management is to blame others and put pressure on people to complete tasks, which is the exact opposite of what makes an effective manager. I could go on for many more paragraphs about how comically bad my experience was, every single day I was surprised again at just how poorly everything is run. I'd say you feel like a number on a spreadsheet but I think that would actually be an improvement! If you've read this because you are considering applying for a role, or maybe considering taking a job offer, please reconsider. This is a company on its way out and full of people coasting along for the ride. They are now even offering voluntary redundancy as a result of poor performance. Find a better opportunity elsewhere.
