Pros
- The work environment is nice with most colleagues except for some. - Salary isn't the best (comparing with the engineering market) but is enough if and only if you work as a developer. - There is a flexible hours to start to work and in most of cases the leaders respect that. - You are free to select your clothes to work unlike the rest of the bank, nothing new in our developer world but it's a point. - In the same way as previous point, the Digital Factory's floors are pretty well, at least two of four of them haha - Additional to last both points, sometimes they provide to you free healthy food like fruits and so on, all depends of Bank's financial situation. - They try to be agile. - They try to recruit best talent then you can find really good developers, again it's not new pro but... - The recruitment process is easy in Digital Factory's scope, just interviews (somebody can consider it like a cons instead of a pros). - The Digital Factory's mission is clear and you can have access to metrics. - The leaders try to foster the meritocracy. - Some leaders try to defend the Digital Factory of bureaucratic processes and issues. - The engineering area try to be data-driven.
Cons
- The career path for different roles inside engineering area is so confusing and sometimes there are "creative" and "original" positions. - In the same way is really confusing how the leaders evaluate based on that career path. - Now, if you want to be promoted to a leader position (i.e. technical lead) you will have to wait that one of current leaders leaves the company because the engineering team doesn't grow enough. - And it may take you two years before you are promoted no matter if you have demonstrated sufficient skills. - The deadlines are imposed by external areas or Bank's president, as you would expect from a bank, so forget your work/life balance. - If the project require more developers, they prefer (and they cannot do anything more) contract outsourcings doesn't matter the bad level so they has a lot, really a lot of tech debt and bugs. - Regarding culture is simple, there are not. You cannot find good practices and others habits like in others tech companies. - As well as there are not benefits, and the worst is that in the interviews the recruiters say lies claiming that there are a lot of them but the reality is that if you have integral salary you don't have benefits, just discounts like you have with any credit card or financial service and they are a bank so... - Regarding diversity & inclusion there are initiatives from Canada but just in some videos, inside Digital Factory if you are a woman or homosexual you can expect some disgusting comments and behaviors even from leaders. - The innovation there is have two roles, two persons, calling fintechs to integrate them with some internal projects and not finalize any integration. - If you like real innovation, test with others and modern languages, implement new architectures, use new tools and technologies, use cloud, CI/CD, etc., you need to prepare to hear "NO" in different ways. Get ready to be just a pawn. - The interaction with other bank areas is unreasonably bureaucratic. It's too common have hidden agendas and political movements. - There are a lot of bureaucratic processes, so a deployment of some services can take 1 month or more. - They has "The God of No’s”: instead of to help, the parent company in Canada impedes the innovation and increases the bureaucratic processes, one time they banned github to all engineers and I think it's still in force. - An advice: don’t believe all leaders say, just compare all with facts. A lot of times they can say that “the pains” will be improve but it never happens, they just sell nice ideas and phrases but they don’t do that because they are bad persons, it’s just that they cannot do anything about it. - The managers and directors are inexperienced people. I think that now you have a panoramic view of what means to work in the Colombia Digital Factory of Colpatria (Scotiabank).