Shrinking company with unrealistic ambitions
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Very international and friendly team.
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Lack of long-term product strategy. Lack of technical understanding as well as empathy in management leading to more experienced developers to leave the company.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
Develop a coherent long-term product strategy and invest to get a reasonable and modern technology stack for it. Hire experienced developers in the field. Empower and trust your employees, the are capable and want to help the company prosper.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
Very friendly colleagues. Management can be difficult to deal with. Frustrated/cynical atmosphere developed over the past couple of years in development.
Kommunikation
Poor communication between management and developers. Every couple of months there is a marketing-style presentation about the product future without any substance. A couple of years ago at least performance reviews were introduced. Unfortunately there is nothing to gain from them as no salary increases or other perks are handed out. "Promotions" are not coupled with salary increases.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
The development team is very cooperative and welcoming.
Work-Life-Balance
Management is inflexible regarding work-from-home and similar things if not already made part of the initial contract. They only accept it when it is opportune (e.g. there is a raging pandemic). Core working hours are between 10am and 4pm.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
Management keeps calling the company a "family" but at the same time is extremely controlling and not empowering or trusting the employees, I guess that is "family" to some people. The goals for the future are extremely ambitious and it is not clear how they are to be achieved. The development team size is shrinking but the ambitions are not.
Interessante Aufgaben
Interesting tasks are there if interested in OS porting work or developing prototypes/demos. Unfortunately the former can get tedious and boring over time and the latter never seems to make it into the development of a sustainable product.
Gleichberechtigung
You will find no woman or foreigner in a leadership position who did not get there by owning shares of the company even though the development team is mostly foreigners. While there were a few women in development in the past, they are now an absolute minority. Several teams have no women in them.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
There are very few older colleagues as the company mostly hires recently graduated developers, assumably for saving cost. This harms aspects of the product development that would profit from more experienced developers, particularly considering the mentioned ambitions.
Arbeitsbedingungen
Very erratic management decisions, barely any planning or realistic long-term perspective (goals are way too amibitious without any planning on how to get there). This is putting pressure on developers without clearly specifying their mid to longterm goals. People are provided poor work equipment (very weak machines), very uncooperative system administration department.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
Management never made this a topic.
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
Salary used to be competitive for a small company but this was not followed up on after several changes in management leading to it not being competitive anymore.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
Can be a nice first stop to get into certain technologies but it might be detrimental to stay for too long since some of the technologies are very dated and the overall market segment is very specific and the company employs a rather unusal technology mix for it.