Pros
- Benefits: Great salary, JET Pay, free tea and coffee in the office, retail benefits via Benify, and a great pension plan. - Upskilling: Got stuck into the codebase instantly and saw a massive improvement in my programming skills, although it was all stuff I had to teach/understand myself.
Cons
- Team culture: Product teams are extremely cliquey and homogeneous, primarily made up of middle-class white men over the age of 30. There’s a lot of gossiping in the office, non-PC or HR-friendly jokes, talking about candidates they’ve just interviewed and judging them based on how they’ll fit into the team vs. the person's skill and merit. It's like 90% a cultural fit and 10% being good at your job. If you’re a recent grad or under 30, a woman, neurodivergent, a person of colour, slightly socially awkward, or anything else that makes you different, it’s unlikely you’ll fit in. Management will blame you for not being “collaborative” and won’t take any accountability because no one else is experiencing the same issues you are (which makes sense if you’re different, of course your issues will be too). There’s a reason why their teams aren’t diverse, they’re not making the necessary accommodations for employees with different needs and backgrounds. They clearly want things to stay as they are otherwise there would be evidence of change. Instead they just hire people as diversity hires and once they’re faced with the reality of what diversity and equity really mean, they’ll find a way to get rid of you. - Values: You know those memes about the tech industry and the overuse of corporate speak over saying or doing anything of substance? That’s JET to a t. There’s a big focus on “collaboration”, “team engagement”, "reducing silos", and “taking ownership”, which in my opinion is used to conceal a much bigger problem of poor collaboration at both the management-level and to keep team members under surveillance. Management are so poor at providing requirements in the first place that team members are forced to be in constant communication, having to align and re-align over and over again, and nothing ever really gets done. You’ll likely end up fixing a piece of work you thought was already completed because of miscommunication from management or because of incorrect instructions. Onboarding is basically non-existent, there’s no documentation, no structure, it’s all just ad-hoc and back-to-back meetings where people just say words at each other. There’s also a large push to have AI do your work for you which is why time spent “collaborating” and having redundant meetings for “alignment” has been so stark lately. Instead of focusing on async work, and improving documentation and processes, they put the onus on the individual to stay in the loop constantly. And if you do bring up any ideas to improve said processes you’ll be met with discouragement or “why aren’t *you* solving this problem?” - Structure: Product teams are largely self-owned so alignment across the company isn’t great. Different parts of the same platform can look completely different depending on which team owns it (and the knowledge sharing meetings they have don’t seem to improve this). There’s a massive lack of structure, core workflows are undefined, and there’s way too many tools and technologies to wrap your head around with little to no documentation or support. They focus more on churning out work rather than making anything of quality. There's a reason why JET is well behind their competitors Deliveroo and Uber Eats, with both their customer and partner-facing platforms. Instead of focusing on user satisfaction and product quality, they focus on turning a profit. This has been without a doubt the worst working experience I've had. Not sure if this is a company wide problem or just this team, but it has really soured my opinion of a company I once admired.
