My name is Haroldas, and I have worked as a developer at Davies Group for two and a half years, all of it was remote, with the first six months driving into the office once a month. My first role at the company was a low-code developer; this was mainly building a web app using Flutter Flow, which is crazy when you think about it now. I took the role because I needed the money, and it was offering a substantially bigger salary than my previous role. It seemed like a good opportunity, a bigger company that I was hoping would lead to bigger and better things in the future. My second role at the company was a backend developer working with .NET C#, and it was much more interesting. I will expand on this later in the post.

I know it is very common to criticise your old employers, and it’s not my intention to do this, but my goal is to genuinely describe my experience with Davies Group and tell the story of my redundancy. I originally wanted to make a video about it, however decided not to put stuff like this on my YouTube channel.

Experience with Davies Group

As mentioned above, my first role at Davies Group was a Low Code Developer, working with Flutter Flow, which is a low-code tool that allows building Flutter apps. Why was it chosen as a tool to build a web app? Well, don’t ask me, I think mainly because the CTO said it was a good idea, which gives you an idea of how technical the CTO was. I still remember coming to the office in Wales for the first time. I got booked into a hotel for a whole week, which was nice. I remember getting my laptop on the first day and then being told that they haven’t sorted out the account for me, so I only managed to log in after about 3 days, my first impression was that I have made a mistake taking this job, even though the salary was higher, they knew for over a month that this would be my first day but still have not managed to get me an account. For some reason, I thought that there would be more order and accountability in a big company, but no, if anything, it’s actually more chaos.

At the time when I was first hired, the company had about 9000 employees; there is literally a counter that goes up and down every few days as they fire/hire people, I didn’t really think much of it at first, as time went on I started to see a pattern every time a new company gets acquired the counter would grow and then it would come down again after they laid off some people. It’s called a healthy corporate environment 😂.

After the first few weeks, it was clear that the role that started off as low code was more like an underpaid full-stack developer role, where I had to quickly learn Flutter and Dart, as the features that they were asking me to add were simply not possible to add in Flutter Flow. I did enjoy building the web app for the Rochdale council; however, I thought the whole situation was crazy. Why build a web app in Flutter Flow? They wanted the whole thing to be modular, customisable, etc., with low code… Then I also had to build additional C# Azure Cloud functions as serverless APIs for the app. It just seemed that these people have no idea about any kind of development, architecture or choosing the correct tools for the job. I went along with it because I needed the money and the job; this was a huge mistake on my part, and I admit it. I still enjoyed the role as I got to build a product, even though I wasn’t enjoying the tech stack or my job title. I still ended up learning about Supabase, PostgreSQL, row-level security, JWT and state management, which can be transferred to other kinds of development. I’m grateful for the experience, but during the time that I was working on that web app. Two of the project managers quit, I think, because that whole situation was such a mess.

During this whole time, I was also going to the University of Wolverhampton, doing the last year of my Computer Science BSc, doing a full-time job, and a full-time degree at the same time was tough, as I really had no evenings and holidays, they were all spent doing assignments, coursework and trying to prepare for exams. I knew that at the end of the day, a degree is just a piece of paper, but I really wanted to achieve it, just to prove to myself that I can get it. I ended up graduating with a first-class degree.

After I graduated, I got moved to a product team to work on an app called VOC(Voice of the Customer), even though my job title was unchanged for about 6 months… Finally, after all of that time and promises, my job title was changed to a Backend Developer, even though I was doing both front-end and backend with JavaScript and C# .NET. I thought, finally, my job title at least somewhat reflects the work that I am doing. As before, I just felt like I was doing more of a full-stack role, whilst having a worse job title and lower pay. The new role came with a pay rise; the way they talked about this pay rise seemed like I would actually be getting a substantial amount of money. It turned out to be 3% that was probably the same as inflation. Anyways, I was happy, I was doing remote developer work in a language that I learned about two years ago in college, so I was using something that I learned in school. At the same time, I got contacted by someone from QA with an opportunity to do a fully funded Master’s Degree. I thought, why not, if it means that I won’t be in any more student loan debt, and will continue to learn something, I’m all for it. So I started doing a Master’s in Software Engineering at the University of Northumbria as a degree apprenticeship through QA, and Davies Group even gave me 6 hours a week to study, that are paid by them. It was a dream come true, a free Master’s Degree whilst working a developer job from home, at this point I was extremely happy, even though the low-code developer experience was not the best, I thought maybe this company is not so bad after all.

As a backend developer, I got to work on a huge codebase and a SaaS product that major UK companies like Lloyds Bank use, which was another dream come true. I worked with some really talented developers and some other colleagues that I would rather not say anything about. The lay-offs came out of nowhere. I was on holiday when I got a call from HR saying that I should check my work email. I did, and I found a letter from HR saying something along the lines of your role is at risk of redundancy, at this point I was already half way through the degree and thought there is no way that they would be investing all of this money into the degree even if its through the apprenticeship levy if they didn’t need me there, so I thought I should be ok.

After I came back from my holiday, I was told that I would be moved to an AI team to work on more interesting problems, so I would have to train another developer, who would replace me, on the app that I was working on. This seemed strange because why would my role be at risk if I am moving to the AI team? They were obviously lying. The layoff experience was horrible, as they hadn’t told me that I was actually being laid off until the very last week. The consultation meetings were a complete joke, with HR staff asking me if I had thought of a way to save my role. as if it were my job to be doing that. Throughout my time there, I was always given very good performance reviews and never had any complaints from any of my managers, so it seemed weird that my role is at risk of redundancy. They also haven’t given any proper reason as to why my role is being made redundant, other than that the business’s needs are changing, and we are going to rely on AI and contractors from cheaper countries. Given that reasoning, you could replace all of the staff in Davies Group, including the HR people. I also tried to secure alternative employment within Davies Group, as apparently, they needed a mid-level developer for another product in another department, during the interview they said we just want to have a conversation with you, to understand you experience, so we did, after it the feedback I received was that apparently it was a test and I scored 6/10 and it needed to be a minimum of 7/10 to be considered for the role. At that point, I thought they just didn’t want me or the other forty-something people that are also being made redundant to be there, so there was no point in trying to do anything to try and stay there.

The sad part is that I just wanted to complete that free degree before being laid off, but I didn’t even get to do that, so a year of studying, doing these stupid assignments and coursework, just went down the drain. In the end, I ended up getting a postgraduate certification for the modules that I completed.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, I see it as a learning experience, and there were moments when I enjoyed the job and the company of my colleagues. At the same time, I’m realising that I should have left that job a long time ago, as I was not truly happy there, nor could I reach my full potential, but given how risk-averse I am, I would have stayed there for years if I wasn’t made redundant, so now I actually see it as a good thing. The moral of the story is that life is too short to work in a backstabbing corporate environment with people who don’t care about anything else but money.

Thoughts on people being replaced by AI

In my opinion, most of these companies are not replacing people with AI; in reality, their businesses are failing and not making as much money as they thought, so they have to fire people to survive. If you say that it’s a restructuring and we are replacing people with AI, automating their jobs, it sounds much better. If AI-generated slop actually worked. Why would you fire anyone? You would use humans and AI to do as much work as possible, making you very productive and wealthy. It’s just my thoughts; maybe I’m still salty that I got laid off.