Investor-driven, opaque, dishonest, delusional.
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Nice office.
Cool people.
Very flexible if you know how to handle yourself.
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Dishonesty and opaqueness.
Very hierarchical.
Nepotism on management levels.
Too many managers and not enough people that can actually get things done.
Financial instability - likely won't survive 2020.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
Be transparent. Move managers to Berlin so you can actually see what's going with their teams. Focus on improving your company instead of being here writing fake reviews. I find it incredible that they dared to claim that the ones that are leaving negative reviews are people that did not do their jobs. Everybody knows that everyone gives their best and the company and founders show absolutely no appreciation for nobody.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
The atmosphere is heavy. All the colleagues are super nice, but not a single employee feels safe. Fear and anger are constant topics of gossip. You can feel how every employee in every team is slowly getting frustrated at how things are done in this company.
You have to cope with lots of Slack communication. Even the HR works remotely (not in Berlin, not in Zürich). Managers come to Berlin for a couple of days once a month or two, and when they do, the atmosphere gets even heavier. On the plus side, having all the management working remotely allows for a pretty flexible work life.
Kommunikation
All communication feels like it's top-down. As mentioned, management works remotely, so all communication happens over Slack. Besides daily stand-ups, management most of the times just ignores any feedback you have because there is always some arbitrary top-priority imposed by the C-level to please investors.
Management does not negotiate or even evaluate the feasibility of a project/feature before committing it to investors with unreasonable deadlines. By the time you hear about the requirements, it's too late for anything to be negotiated.
Transparency is another big issue. Managers and leads do not want to acknowledge that there are issues with the product, the working structure, the processes. Problems are not communicated internally.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
Colleagues are what makes this startup ok-ish. We regularly cook together and go out for beers. Nevertheless, staff turnover is ridiculously high. They recently fired almost half of the company because of a lack of investment, and when those colleagues are gone, there is not much else to look forward in Piavita.
Work-Life-Balance
Some people have a really nice work-life balance, others do not. While some people come and go and work their hours however they want, there is another group of people who apparently celebrate the fact that there are people working 16 hours a day for almost half a year in order to "save the company".
Vorgesetztenverhalten
While team leads and mid-level managers are nice, reasonable people, the C-level makes them work way beyond what I consider appropriate. This level of stress permeates down to the employees under those managers.
Nowadays the company is rated so bad that either the founders or someone from HR is posting fake positive reviews to push the score up. This review has been brought down three times already. Do not fall in that trap.
Most people would agree that it's the C-level that is bringing the company to a bad place in more ways than one.
Interessante Aufgaben
Since the C-level is short-sighted, there is no room for innovation anymore. New projects are cancelled or deprioritized all the time. Especially in 2020, since there is no money to even allow experimentation or exploration of new technologies, Piavita will surely stagnate.
It feels like priorities are not in order, people just care about looking good to investors and having a successful company. What they don't realize is that without the product the company is nothing.
Gleichberechtigung
I consider Piavita to be an equal-opportunity employer. There is a good amount of diversity in almost every aspect. Piavita employs people of all races, religions, genders and sexual orientations. I do not give 5-stars because I have seen cases not of discrimination, but of favoritism towards German or Swiss people.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
Everyone gets treated equally no matter how senior or junior you are.
Arbeitsbedingungen
The office is quite nice, we have a really nice kitchen and a bathroom with a shower. The office however does not have AC and it gets really hot (34 C) in the summer since it's on the top floor. We also have had problems with the heating this winter. The internet is sometimes slow and there are no plans of improving it. The C-level actually threatened to restrict access to all personal devices (i.e. you cannot connect your phone to the office WiFi) because they argue that there are too many devices on the network and that's why the internet is slow.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
I cannot say anything about environmental, much less about social responsibility without seriously getting in legal trouble due to NDAs. However, be wary of the nasty business practices you'll see or hear about day to day.
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
Salary is competitive. 25 days of holidays, no extra benefits. However, once you sign up for a salary, that's what you'll get.
Image
Employees do not speak well about the company. The C-level clearly cares a lot about the external image of the company, but they have no idea how bad it is internally. Often you hear colleagues referring to Piavita as "a joke", "a failed experiment", etc.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
The company was a good stepping stone towards something better, somewhere else.