- High Churn - many colleagues left after a year
- Offer Rejections - many good engineers took offers from other companies instead
- Stressful
- Least Flexible Employer Ever
- Time Pressure all day every day - you're always on the clock via timed Jira tickets - eg. 4 hours to implement this new thing (usually crappily due to time pressure), 2-4 hours to fix that other crappily done thing by another colleague, have to book 8 hours a day no matter what happens... tube was delayed in morning, tough luck, find a way to book 8 hours of condensed sub-standard time-rushed work or face review of why your tickets are taking longer than the estimates
- Relentless Without Reprieve - as soon as you solve one ticket you immediately rush to the next ticket, all day, every day - it's relentless
- Most people eat at their desks every day because of time pressures
- Endless legacy/rubbish work. Spending too much of your time fixing things that were done badly because they were under logged time pressure originally, while you're again under logged time pressure to do just enough to patch it over to get working again
- People know they're doing rubbish work on top of rubbish work, but are too worried to rock the boat so they just keep their heads down
- When you raise issues for improvements in Pull Request reviews, people just beg you to approve anyway and leave that for future because they're already over their ticket time so leave technical debt for next person
- Even new implementations are often as bad as old ones due to time pressure, compounding their lack of expertise on the tech
- Lack of Expertise - you don't have time to read or keep your skills up to date due to time pressures
- Extremely restrictive environment. Things that would take 1 command elsewhere instead take 30-60 mins of time wasting workarounds due to paranoid over-the-top security
- No Working-from-Home (I heard from ex-colleagues that they did some during first Covid lockdown only because they had no choice)
- Severely restricted use of GitHub in your day-to-day work and almost no public contributions worth speaking of. Your work dies in GR.
- Couldn't even take technical notes home from what you figured out that day to solve a specific tech problem - it's mostly dead work and dead knowledge
- No Phone or any electronics allowed in office - have to keep in locker outside
- Extremely paranoid environment
- Unlikely to change - it's been like this for years - I've had similar reports from a lot of people throughout the industry, people who left, people who interviewed and didn't go, and several recruiters who talked to even more ex-GR people
- One G-Research colleague called it "depressing"
- Another GR colleague said he was "fed up wasting time on things that nobody outside G-Research will ever care about". ie. non-portability of skills / implementations
- Another GR colleague said "they pay well but they work you hard"
- Multiple ex-colleagues independently not knowing each other literally called it "slavery" when describing GR, because that's what it feels like to have your work day be so tightly controlled, it's abnormal
- Doesn't care about people - just pretends to in order to get people to work for them because otherwise they would have even more job offers rejected
- Unless you're desperate for the money, don't go
