Could be so much better…
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Many great employees, very international staff, great core product (=AnyDesk)
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
- Management is a joke
- The company is run very unprofessionally
- You need to like chaos if you don't want to get crazy while working there
- The wrong people get promoted; it is more important that you make things shiny and come up with ideas and suggestions that sound extraordinary instead of doing a great job
- Too much toxic behavior by selected people
- Unprofessional and irrational decisions by the management
- No leadership for most of the company
- No long-term orientation; "plans" change way to often
- No proper planning regarding the product or everything that relates to it
Verbesserungsvorschläge
- Find capable managers to lead the company!!
- Professionalize the work within the company by establishing clear responsibilities, structures, make people accountable, don't allow toxic behavior
- Listen to people that have experience and bring up suggestions
- Establish a sustainable and healthy work culture by encouraging collaboration and valuing professional work (not possible with bullet point #1, in my opinion)
- Stop thinking of AnyDesk as a "Start-Up" or "Scale-Up" and finally make it a professionally run company which it should be after being on the market for 10 years
Arbeitsatmosphäre
There are great people working for AnyDesk but the company lacks professional management on all levels and every team has to fight with its own problems. These problems usually relate to bad leadership or management and unprofessional work on upper levels.
On team level, people often are happy with their peers and how the team works as such. Between the teams, it is often a bit more tricky but I also have seen examples of great cross-team collaboration. However, too often, cross-department work is inefficient, in too many cases even toxic depending on who is involved.
There's a lot of company politics happening behind closed doors. Quite uncommon in my experience in company's of this size.
Kommunikation
There used to be almost no communication like 1-2 years ago. The company grew a lot and the senior management did not understand the importance of proper communication. After there were many complaints about the terrible communication, things got a bit better over time.
While proper information was shared in management, the workforce only were shown charts without any numbers “to show the company is doing alright”, for instance. Recently, additional improvements were made introducing regular company meetings, in which information on current and future topics are presented. This also even involved numbers. However, the information being shared was more like an internal pitch or company-internal marketing and less of a professional internal communication. Everyone just mentioned the topics that went well and ignored problems and activities that did not go as intended.
On many occasions, communication was assigned to team leads. For instance, someone in the upper management was kicked out and it was up to the team leads to tell their people but nobody seems to knew the actual reasons for the firing.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
I have experienced both great teamwork and toxic work environments while being employed at AnyDesk. Depends a lot on the actual colleague, whether or not the colleague is in your own team or another one, and on the personal goals of the colleague.
Work-Life-Balance
There is people hardly making their 40 hours per week (which nobody seems to care about) and there's others doing way more than that. If you want to get the senior management's attention, you should be available/in the office late and be available also later in the evenings. Unless you work in some role with specific working hours, you have a lot of flexibility. But effort and overtime are not guarantee for anything. Too many people already worked way more than what was contractually agreed and didn't see money, promotions, or anything else for it.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
Senior management is terrible: creating a toxic environment, no professional leadership, too much company politics and too much going on behind closed doors.
Middle management depends on the person. You can find everything from people that lack professional experience or leadership experience, but there's also a few colleagues that really are trying to do their best. Too many of those have left or had to leave the company over the past months and years though...
Interessante Aufgaben
Really depends on your job. You can find interesting tasks and some colleagues are always doing what they like leaving the unpleasant tasks to their colleagues. This is typically no issue for the management since they just do not care way too often.
Gleichberechtigung
Generally speaking, I think all employees are mostly treated equally. Management is predominantly male but this is not uncommon in the tech industry.
In a few cases, however, I experienced that females colleagues were not treated as they should have been (e. g. by (male) managers falsely calling them somebody's "assistant" on purpose even though they had a higher role; I did not experience any such behavior towards male colleagues).
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
Usually, "older" means "more experienced" and AnyDesk has created an environment to distract those colleagues. Younger colleagues with no experience are preferred by upper management since they don't ask questions, work late into the night, and can be influenced more easily.
Arbeitsbedingungen
IT equipment is good, monitors are still only HD by default but other than that you get what you need and if you don't have it already you can request it. Those requests usually are not a problem and being handled fast and without complications or excessive approval processes or so.
One office in Stuttgart is very nice. Modern building, lots of light and a nice atmosphere. This building lacks proper AC. Working in there when it's hot is no fun at all since it gets really warm. The other building is not far away from the headquarters (across the street). It's a lot darker there and just not as nice but at least it has an AC and the same benefits as in the main building (like beverages, interior, equipment,...). Teams and people were placed around quite a lot which makes it hard to give a proper statement here but overall I’d say that the company (=office management) does a good job.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
Nobody gives a ****. Sorry to say but senior management didn't care for Covid restrictions, didn't care when Russia conducted its "special military operation" and does not seem to be interested in anything like that. Initiatives or impulses by the workforce in that regard are not heard.
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
I guess it really depends on the employee, how the employee negotiates the salary, and how his/her work is being appreciated. Salary can be good, in few cases higher than elsewhere (if you convince the "right" people) but there is also people paid below average according to their statements. It also depends a lot on the department you’re working in and what people in the department are worth to the company.
Image
AnyDesk has received many complaints for not being reachable and having issues with license renewals lately. Ratings on trustpilot got a lot worse over the last months. AnyDesk is also heavily used by scammers and does not seem to take the topics seriously (despite of some marketing stunts).
One thing that many employees did not support at all and which, in my opinion, also caused damages to the brand is that AnyDesk hasn't cared about Russia's war in the Ukraine.
What's worst in my opinion is the fact that employees are very often not talking positively about AnyDesk. It seems like the employees are convinced of the product but not the company and how things have developed especially for the last few years.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
There are no career paths, development plans or any other initiatives to pro-actively guide employees to develop. Every employee is responsible for himself/herself and there is a strong dependency on your superior. I think usually team leads support their employees if they want trainings or so but they need to show the initiative, prepare everything and pitch it to their superiors. I have seen only very few examples of team leads that pro-actively sit down with their people and discuss any development plans or activities.
On the "pro" side, there is multiple examples of people that only needed few months or years to make it up into the management and/or get responsibility over people or important tasks. In most of the cases, however, it was less the actual work they did than company politics and talking to the right people that pushed their careers...