Once, maybe, a good company. Now a squeeze machine with everyone on the verge of burning out. Stay away.
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
- My colleagues are great, sometimes sad that we get together because we all have the same bad experience instead of celebrating how good working here is.
- WFH is good, although I doubt this is a "good" thing in this company only, as in, it's not a trait that exists only here, but it's done right without any hidden/small text/clauses in your contract. No constant time tracking.
- Keep in mind that this entire review is about teams on the explore and discovery group. I'm not sure how much of it is actually true for less customer facing groups, but given what I'm seeing, it's the same everywhere. If you're in the interviewing process, might be worth asking it your team belongs to that group, so you can better consider these opinions.
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
- I guess each point above have this information already.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
- Review your lower managers. It's infected by toxic relationship and egocentric decision making processes. There are people who shouldn't even hold a manager position.
- Create a safe independent channel between engineers and manager's management/HR/people board and track actions taking very fast decisions.
- Stop squeezing your engineers, you're not "raising the bar", whatever that means. You're inducing mental sickness into people through burnouts, frustration, stress and demotivation. You will end up with empty teams.
- Review the "salary and promotion" thing. It's flawed, opinionated and heavily dependent on politics instead of the efficiency and technical capabilities that you're looking for/need.
- Give your lower level managers management training. Distance them from teams until a proper training is finished, if necessary (this decision must not come from manager's manager, they look like a close group where everyone got their backs being equally evil and bad at managing people below them).
- Listen to your engineers. They are the ones suffering most.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
Management has a default behaviour of never praising what you do right. They will only communicate "if something is not right" which means you're in constant fear during your probation period and stress in normal time. Most of the issues in this company are because of management behaviour. They claim transparency, good communication and flat hierarchy. In reality decisions, not only technical, are done by managers and every day these decisions change based on politics and what seems to be egocentric decisions from other teams management. The decisions are mainly done in private chats where no one else has access. Meetings rarely have written records in wikis, there are plenty of useless meetings and none of them follow an efficient way of describing what the meetings is about before even jumping into it and create a record after its closure. Many top down decisions being enforced. As a software developer you'll hardly find space to raise your technical concerns and when you do, management will ignore them. The flat hierarchy is a fallacy, or well, it's there between engineers only. If the structured organogram is top down.
Kommunikation
Toxic politics, every, single, day. All the time. Engineers that are supposed to be dealing with tech are overwhelmed by helping managers doing basic work, causing decision being made on the fly, in private chats, no documentation. The rare ADRs found in the wiki are mostly old. Stakeholders come in hot with impossible deadlines and POs hardly fight against them, confirming that things can be done even if the team, collectively, agrees and shows off during ceremonies that the team is overwhelmed. Teams are split in names that make absolutely no sense at all, which raises the complexity level to anyone that joins the team unnecessarily. Managers also passive aggressively shove you a diagram when you ask who is responsible for what, creating a fear environment where you'd rather not interact with managers to try to solve something, so you need either to ask your team or colleagues, or feign ignorance.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
One of the rare good things here. Engineers are amazing people. There are so many talented people that I only hope they see better opportunities of working environment soon, because they don't deserve to have that much talent and be in this company. Most of the ones I got in contact were very happy, positive, easy talking people. Most will spend time explaining things if they can.
Work-Life-Balance
It's a burnout pit. It feels that whatever the team, developers are always on the edge of burning out. Some colleagues already had it multiple times in this company. There are no plans of changing the working hours to anything less than 40, because they believe remote work is already good enough. No one forces you join on call duties, there is a very relaxed core hours policy and no time is tracked.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
This was already mentioned in the Arbeitsatmosphäre. Managers will go behind your back doing decisions and you'll have to simply follow along. They will talk to other team managers saying to squeeze you as much as you can, even though you reported that the rhythm is too high. Many managers are unprepared managers. They were engineers that ended up as a manager, causing a gap between the social skills required for the job and from what they can offer, which they will, ironically, complain if you a too techy person. It feels like being a lab rat for manager's social skill, they will test everything on you and you can only accept, you can contest, but good luck. Management get things personally and get offended very easy, but they can do whatever they want with your workflow and don't you dare get offended.
Interessante Aufgaben
You'll be maintaining a huge marketplace very likely confined in your team until either another team needs you or your manager see that you can do more for the same price and perhaps split you between teams and squeeze the life out of you under the impression that you're getting in contact with more tech. There are legal stuff to adapt, new features to implement, but you'll hardly have a say or room for proposing new features. Tech debt often piles up, so prepare do deal with some legacy undocumented inefficient stuff. There is very good platform and infrastructure in place to learn about distributed systems though which is a huge potential and quite an unique opportunity to work on such environment, although you'll have to poke people around to get to know more about the techs and sometimes this communication is not very efficient.
Gleichberechtigung
Can't say anything good or bad. I've see successful people, regardless they sexual orientation, in different areas and levels, therefore I would say it's not a problem. Although I don't trust management so, who knows what happens outside my scope.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
Can't say anything good or bad, although I don't trust management so, who knows what happens outside my scope.
Arbeitsbedingungen
Their HQ in Köln, at least, is amazingly good. There aren't many tables that would fit the whole company, which is even better, to be fair. The isles have separation between each desk within, it's a very well lit room, you have 3 separate levels of noise in the office but even the loudest one is really calm. In terms of remote they will provide you good laptops and anything extra you might need such as mice or monitors. You can definitively do your job.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
Unfortunately this is quite controversial. As a marketplace the job is basically sell as much plastic stuff from cheap manufacturers/resellers as you can. I'm not aware of any appraisal for local sellers/manufacturers. There is one or another campaign during the year to collect plastic around Rhein, but other than that there is hardly anything done for the environment. I'm not aware of any social campaign.
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
Money is ok if you're willing to give up part or your soul completely. Not that you want, but they will squeeze it out of you. As others say, they are trying to increase efficiency with less money, meaning the remaining souls on board will have to do much more with the same amount of money. The only difference is that it works in US because they pay a lot more than EU does (you must consider taxes, economical context, but at the end of the day, it doesn't work like that) for software development.
Image
Was an old brand "hitmeister" that got changed into "real-digital" that got rebranded as Kaufland e-commerce when it was acquired (?) by Schwarz group. It's confusing and no one cares to explain you.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
Don't you dare contest the managers. They will make sure the next review round, done only by managers against your amount of work. They will also passive aggressively say that money is not the most important thing, that you're never fit to the next level. Many managers and "people" people get raise and public appraisal, engineering though has no saying on how good managers' work was. It's unknown who evaluates the manager, but there is a very clear path for the engineers. The only thing is, good luck convincing your manager that you're in the right path, spoiler: you won't. There isn't a safe place for management concerns either, meaning you can't complain or report anything without expecting to either be forwarded to lower level management, which means you'll likely reach the same level of the person you're trying to report, which in its turn comes with the risk of retaliation. There is a supposed training budget that is not transparent. You don't have any visibility on what's left.