The main reason was that it was too difficult to change anything there and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. This might have changed by know.
After Softonic I started at Splendia, where I am still at. Splendia is a hotel booking website focusing on luxury hotels. The company is much smaller than Softonic in every respect.
What drew me in was that they replaced nearly the whole IT team and replaced it with a much more agile team using technologies and methodologies that are industry standards in most PHP companies.
The team is also always open for changes to improve the speed of development.
When we arrived the state of the code was pretty bad. How bad? Well, there were zero unit tests at the beginning of 2012 for example.
By now we have a growing test suite, continuously run through Jenkins. We use github for code reviews, vagrant for workspace virtual machines, cucumber for functional tests, puppet for configuration management and composer to pull in various dependencies including symfony components, doctrine and pear libraries.
I will post some more about how we use these in the future.
Other nice perks: the computers are nice with two big screens, you get to install your choice OS as long as it runs vagrant. The office is located in the centre of Barcelona, which gives a better choice of restaurants and shops. I can also park my bike in the office, which allows me to commute every day now (more about this later too).
There are some things I miss about Softonic though (besides the people there): the pretty office, Spanish classes, free coffee, snacks and the cafeteria for my tea time.
Compared to Softonic the office hours at Splendia are also very rigid, which is annoying.
Well, hopefully more soon...
