Nordic Insurance Software

There are many cons; here are some in an unsorted list.
(A case can be a bug, a change request or a support case)

You will have to register every single minute you spend during the day, in their custom time registration system. Every morning will your time registration system say -7.5 hours, and when you leave will it have to say 0 hours.

Research and training is not allowed, except when we get a case for it.

Strict work hours, 9:00 to 17:00. If you are more than 5 minutes late you are required to inform your team leader via SMS or email.

Although I was hired as a MVC Web Developer, only 9% of my time were spend on MVC cases, 21% on ASP.NET Forms the last 70% where spend on Windows Forms Application. I complained about this many times, but nothing was done. (I know this so precisely as I had to register very minute I spend on cases!)

You will have to ask permission to leave to find a cup of coffee from the store, or if you want to leave 15 min early.

No training (other than a 5 min run though of the application), then on the first day you arrive you are given a list of bugs to fix, the will continue until the day you quit. When you finish your current list of bugs, more are just assigned to you.

Knowledge sharing or helping out a colleague is actively discouraged, as you will not be able to register that time on a case.

The code base is 80% VB.NET, and almost all new code written is VB.NET, even though the job application only says C# and .NET.

Developers do not know the business logic, this is due to the case system and total lack of training. I was told multiple times “I know I have made about 90% of that system, but I have no idea how it works.”

The Code is a big mess, many files on 3k+ lines of code with a match of Service, DAL, view-logic and business logic mixed into one big random mess (No a single design pattern have been used).

We are not allowed to use “new” technologies such as WPF or TypeScript, as the other developers do not want to learn how to use it.

There are no expertise areas, cases are just given to the next available person.

They use the same backend code for the Web systems as the Desktop system, resulting in an extremely slow web site.

The database have no relations, as “that does not work our data structure”, it is just a generic database, with one table containing meta items.

In the version control there is just one branch that all developers work on. Do one commit a bug, as it will break all developers’ builds.

They say they work in teams, but the teams they talk about there are the Developer team and the Test Team. These are not teams but departments.

There are no project structure such as Scrum, Prince or anything, you will just get a new list of cases every day, or when you are done. Bases are based on customers reporting bugs, needing support or request changes. They do not want to use a project structure such a Scrum or Prince as they do not feel it will fit their case structure.

Each case takes about 0.5-3 hours to complete, one out of 10 might take up to 10 hours. So some days you can have up to 10 cases in a day in completely different areas of the system (Web, Forms, and so on), that you will need to get into. There are no goals, just an endless stream of bugs that require very little technical knowledge to fix, but takes a long time to locate.

They value you knowing all short cuts in visual studio, and think that the amount of code you can write pr. hour, says how good a developer you are.

The developers working there are, with a few exceptions, all self-taught, with no schooling beyond high school. I will not even talk about what kind of non-developer jobs they have had before their current employ.