Checkout.com Software Developer reviews

An awful, awful place to work. Companies really show their true colours when things go badly and Checkout is in a death spiral. There is a revolving door of execs (10 in 18 months and counting!! 😂). Each new appointment weaker than the last, along with knee jerk changes in strategy every time. After the latest "shake up" nobody knows what anybody is or should be working on. Rumours spread faster than the truth, breeding a toxic working environment. The people who rise to the top do so by undermining others - individualism and ladder climbing is rewarded over collaboration. Questioning the direction is not permitted. One of our new "Operating principles" is Talk Straight, yet anonymous questions are banned. No one in the organisation would dare ask an uncomfortable question without that protection (those that do are swiftly and quietly exited) and Q&As have become meaningless as a result.

The company does give a good impression during the recruitment process but that fell apart shortly after I started. There was a huge amount of pressure and stress created by middle management who seemed to be focused on looking good to the higher ups with no regard at all for quality work or the well-being of their engineers. I didn't quite realise how badly working checkout was affecting me until I resigned. The office politics that came from above was savage and I saw fellow engineers and other teams being thrown under the bus by engineering management. They loaded me up with unrealistic deadlines to set me up for personal failure and got aggressive when I tried to push back yet preached "feel free to push back on deadlines" in team wide calls. It was clear that the various layers of management above the team were not honest to each other. A complete disaster and a mental health nightmare. My team regularly raised feelings of burnout and concerns about quality of work due to the pressure and volume of work being expected yet our managers did nothing to help this as that pressure was coming from them. Another thing is a lack of any investment in the engineers. We asked for one afternoon each month to up skill in something and got told no. At no stage did my manager/s ever discuss career growth or goals. The deadlines set were so tight there was no room for onboarding or investigations. Overall the company does not treat it's people well at all. This is a very toxic environment from the top down right through the middle management layers.