Read this - and then do not work for Maersk.
Pros
When I first joined Maersk I really loved it. We were able to travel to Copenhagen, the work environment was relaxed, I felt empowered and valued and able to make a difference. There was opportunity to travel. I believed that the goal of the company was to strengthen it's weak software development capability in the UK and hence reduce it's reliance on external vendors who were (and are) mainly based in India. The good things: There (was) opportunity to travel. Free canteen with cake on Wednesday. Good work-life balance. Can work from home. There are a few decent people trying desperately to cling on. Things started to change about a year ago. Plenty of silly cost cutting measures were put into place. Developers have had to argue, for example, about why they need Visual Studio and can't just use Visual Studio Code. Most of the time, these decisions and arguments are with people who just don't understand the first thing about software engineering. There has been a recent re-organisation in the IT department which has been incredibly poorly managed and left the best part of a thousand people severely upset. This is why I have decided to post this review.
Cons
The Bad things Senior management are clueless. People have tried to communicate with various people in the executive team. Many of them have literally no clue what they are doing and have very little knowledge of the software industry. Terrible IT organisation. The IT organisation is poor. There are too many people who talk for a living and not enough people doing real work. It is hard to get recognition. If there was one word to describe it - it would be 'chaotic'. Few opportunities for development or growth. For many employees, there are few opportunities. The mantra seems to be to place people in boxes and then have them stay there. Some managers are better than others. Variable quality staff (mostly in India). Many of the staff are inexperienced or poorly skilled. Take a look through the reviews here. Notice how many of them are from India. That's because a lot of the organisation is based there. And the standard is just what it usually is. If you are experienced in the industry you will know exactly what I mean. But here it's worse. Widespread problems There are problems wherever you look. The time-sheet system is poor. The expenses system keeps crashing. Almost every computer system in this firm has issues because they simply don't employ good enough staff and too many roles are performed out of India.... Lacklustre IT support If you have a problem with your phone or your computer and you log an IT support ticket - good luck. It will take a long time for someone to get back to you, if they ever do. If you call the internal helpline you will be on the phone to a call center somewhere in the Philippines where someone will read from a script and will not have a clue. You end up doing everything yourself. Understaffed HR department. Getting a reply from HR on any issue sometimes takes weeks. There are a handful of people for a lot of staff. They are hopelessly understaffed. It's very hard to make progress on things like queries about pay-stubs, pensions, contracts or anything like that. It's even hard to hire people because HR are just so sluggish. Amateurish funding model. I will not go into too many details here. However there are issues with the way that work is funded that encourage failure and sloppy work. Excessive cost focus. Company has spent years being extravagant and paying external vendors way too much for substandard work. Suddenly, the focus has shifted to cost, but in the wrong way. Important tools are being cut. People have to justify spend on servers to the Nth degree when people are crying out for servers. There is no money to do important work that needs to be done. This is how software engineering looks when decisions are made by an idiot and an accountant together. Poor IT security. The lack of skill and the lack of motivation shows. The company had a major virus outage a few years ago which took down the entire firm. It was completely avoidable. However, security is still pretty lax and, more worryingly, even when issues are known about, people are too slow , or there's not enough funding, to do anything about it. Since I joined this company, it's been a constant battle with idiots from day one. The place is way too political - there is too much offshoring and there is too little real talent. f you value your career, you will give this place a miss. I have no reason to lie to you. Take this advice seriously. I'm starting to get embarrassed to have this place on my resume. It's a great place to work if you don't give a damn and fancy coasting into retirement - which is basically what most of the managers are doing. If you want to be valued and if you genuinely care about doing a good job and have your skills improve, look elsewhere - which is what most talented people tend to do after working here a while. I only wish I could give this company a grade low enough. It's just too hard to do a good job here. It's very frustrating and it makes you feel sad every day. I have had enough. I am seriously just waiting for the right job to come along to get the hell out.
