Software Developer Review

My role includes anything people ask of me - from software development to data entry. Recently, my role has leant more towards supporting the team's business processes, and tasks that management delegate. I have limited contact with external customers. My day-to-day responsibilities currently include writing up team documentation, attending meetings, inventing business processes, and completing coursework/university responsibilities. In the past, my role included a limited scope of software development, but there wasn't much guidance on best practices or design principles, anything like that.

I have gained an Agile Scrum Developer qualification. I've gained limited knowledge of the React framework, and Node.js, through knowledge sharing with peers. I've had internal and external training on Agile development, but limited opportunity to implement this in practice to the full extent of my knowledge. I've gained quite a few personal/interpersonal skills, mostly through being out of my comfort zone in terms of professional interactions. I have very limited knowledge of AWS.

We usually have a good team environment, and the people I work with are for the most part friendly, professional, and all-round good colleagues. However, I don't feel the programme meets my expectations. The company seems to undergo a lot of restructuring and directional changes, but these never successfully tackle the core issues the business faces. I'm not given many opportunities for training and development, this usually comes second to customer work, as this is what makes us recoverable - customer work + no training = a bad time. The company culture is one of shirking blame - it's rare that someone wants to own up to a decision and accept responsibility, it's always down to someone else, or some other factor, that seems to make everything out of everyone's hands.

There was no formal induction process as far as I'm aware when I started - we're only now coming up with something formal for the whole team. Training is provided in theory, but 1. it's employee driven (they rarely ask us to train in areas of essential knowledge, we have to be aware of the deficit and apply ourselves), 2. it has to align with business perception of value (we can get declined because "we don't see the value" of basic programming training or "we're not looking to use that [language, within the team]; nobody knows it". Of course you can't use it if nobody knows it - that's what the training's for!) We are given study days, but if there is urgent work we're expected to put university work aside temporarily. Due apprentices being given study days, we're not usually given time inside of work for training - the justification being that we're already spending 20% of our time not working/being recoverable anyway. Tasks are often delegated by management to members of the team who don't necessarily have the knowledge, experience, expertise, or authority to be doing them. The degree itself is not particularly well-organised; communication is haphazard and inconsistent, grading is not very transparent, and it seems like every time the university contacts me, it's a different person calling themself my "key contact" or "programme lead".

Support is not made clearly available - it's often said that we should go and talk to them if we have problems, but I'm never sure what sorts of problems are big enough to bother with escalating in that way. Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting peoples' time, other times I'm made to feel like I'm silly for not having escalated sooner. When I do ask for support, the issue is usually resolved, but that depends on the level of effort required. There's plenty of offer of support, but not a lot of follow-through, so I don't usually bother asking - maybe that's another company culture problem.

Very limited. Communication is haphazard. I don't have a key contact that I feel I can go to for support - if I need something, I email a generic support address, and they forward my issue onto someone else. We have quarterly calls which usually end up being 6 months apart. I don't yet feel challenged in any meaningful way by my learning - the only challenge so far is trying to decipher what the coursework briefs are trying to ask for. This is not an intentional challenge, as far as I can tell. Individual lecturers seem to have different levels of investment - some make boring subjects really interesting, and provide necessary out-of-lecture support, customised slide decks based on demand, etc.. Others do not meet these standards, make interesting subjects a chore, have sub-par training material, etc.

I am learning things that I could/should put into practice, but I'm not particularly given the opportunity to do so. I'm currently being taught how to create dataflow diagrams, context diagrams, etc.; these would be very useful in my project, especially since we have an acknowledged lack of documentation and business processes like these that has caused huge problems in the past, but no changes have been made to fix those problems.

We occasionally have fundraising events for our charity partner, and there are opportunities as an apprentice to get involved in local communities due to the Responsible Business initiative. I'm not aware of any company sports teams. We do have employee networks - supporting LGBT+ employees, disabled employees, women in business, and ethnic/cultural minority employees. There used to be more social Junior Talent events, but since the scheme was revamped (and legacy/grandfathered Junior Talent employees were forgotten/excluded, as they werent part fo the new intake) I haven't had any visibility on those.

No

Unpleasant company culture. This is not a company for software developers. There's a distinct lack of support/training for getting good at my job - it seems like if we can "get by", that's good enough. No need to strive for anything better, that would be a waste of time/resources! Constant restructuring is confusing and unpleasant - I find it difficult to know and understand business direction, or even who my senior leadership team are.

Assessment centres - if you get through a video interview, you may be invited to an assessment centre, which is an all-day session in which you and a bunch of other candidates are asked to complete various tasks, finished off with an interview. They don't particularly look for success in the tasks, they just want to see how you work and interact when you're put into a team/collaboration situation. Don't worry too much about it!