Used to be very good, before it was sold
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Remote work was adapted really well and the few colleagues holding the thing together are really good at their jobs and it's enjoyable to work with them
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Announcing you are selling the entire company after "looking for a partner" for a year is not the best move.
Communication and management is horrifying. Any attempt to "improve" that makes it worse. "Hey we are having an all hands meeting with an important update on a holiday in half the country, but we won't record it", leaving people with questions for days, is just very very poor communication.
While they used to be transparent about numbers, there has been no information about that since secunet.
Bringing in old white men from secunet, who are "knowing better" than the (mostly) younger colleagues working for SysEleven for years is also a very bad idea.
Project timelines are always completely delusional
"we are on it" is the most common answer for anything, that they are telling you for years about a simple task, that should be done within less than a week (e. g. putting an open position in the website, when it is known for over a year that this position is needed)
Verbesserungsvorschläge
Start to listen to your employees. Stop ignoring them. Start to communicate things early, no one is mad if you are canceling some announced project, but waiting with the announcement of something after it is finished, is bad. Stop waving away any concerns because "that's just your personal problem". Telling people to leave if they are complaining about something and being mad and surprised if they actually do that, should also not be a thing.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
Colleagues are trying their best, but everyone is overworked and pissed about the many things going wrong, openly communicating that to you. Of course that has a negative impact on the atmosphere, but that's really understandable. It would be a lot better if management would listen and fix things.
After being sold to secunet, it went down rapidly, due to a lot of unanswered questions, concerns being unaddressed and many changes coming from secunet.
Kommunikation
Communication is disastrous. Most of the time, there is none at all - but that's the best they can do. IF management is communicating, it's even worse. They are using very deceitful speech, as if they were trying to sell something to a customer, but you really cannot do that with your employees.
Everyone being constantly overworked is not "a challenge". It's a problem. "Crunch time" is not a positive thing.
Also, they always miss the good timing, when you should communicate something. Everything always leaks already, due to people getting involved, with an announcement following like four weeks later. They really need to learn to tell people what's going on in time - not after everyone is already working on some new project, they never officially heard of.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
This really depends on the teams. Some teams are working really well together and work their asses off, to keep everything running. Other teams seem to not work at all. Also there are some people, who really abuse their colleagues being good at their jobs, not doing anything themselves, but rather pretend the work of their colleagues would be theirs as well.
Working with other teams is really coinflip, some are actually trying, others want to get rid of you as fast as possible.
With a lot of people coming over from secunet, it feels like they are trying to infiltrate all the teams, resulting in more meetings behind closed doors and people not communicating as open as before.
Work-Life-Balance
100% home office/remote work possible. So in theory very good. You could shut down your notebook after eight hours. Unfortunately, there is so much work to do and it you have any sense of responsibility for what you are doing and offering to customers, you will have to work overtime. A lot. And that is also expected by management, since they refuse to hire more people, but also hold you personally responsible, if something goes wrong.
If you are doing on-call, you can entirely ignore what I just wrote, since you will have 1-2 weeks a month with no "life" at all, it's just work. Expect to be working 24/7, depending on which team you are on, you will be called multiple times a night, while they still expect you to attend to work on the next morning. You really cannot do anything for that week, even going to the supermarket is a risk. Going out with friends or family? Not possible at all.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
Terrible. The communication is very, very bad. They completely ignore every single problem there is, while waiting for it to resolve on its own. There is no Feedback at all, but that's also impossible anyways, since they have to pretend to be not knowing what's going on in their teams, because otherwise they would have to admit to be doing a terrible job.
Most people don't get promoted to lead positions, but get hired as leads. Wo obviously it is an issue to have team lead, who does not know the team or their work. The few people who get promoted internally aren't receiving any professional training on leadership at all, so they are learning on the job, usually resulting in them being overwhelmed with complaints and either ignoring them to protect themselves or quitting, because bringing these issues up to higher management is basically impossible and entirely wasted effort.
Upper management refuses see any issues, everything is working very well, according to them. Head positions fighting each other is a common thing. They also refuse to hear anything Engineering-Teams have to say, since they always know better than them. Of course they never admit failures.
Interessante Aufgaben
If you are not busy with ducktaping everything, so it keeps working somehow, there are a lot of interesting topics you could work on
Gleichberechtigung
Since it is IT, there are mostly men. However, I don't feel like equality is an issue, everyone is accepted the same way and there are some efforts to empower more women. There just aren't a lot out there, willing to work in this field of IT, can't blame the company on the fact that 95% of applicants are male.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
Really good, people don't really care how old or young you are
Arbeitsbedingungen
You get everything you need to work, there is also 500€ home office budget every 3 years to spend on whatever you need.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
They are trying, but mostly greenwashing. On one hand, there is only vegan food options at parties, on the other hand they stopped a program, where they were planting trees for every new employee. Also nobody cared about the real environmental issues, the company has, like the sustainability of the datacenters (until customers asked for it)
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
Salary is definitely on the lower end of the spectrum. Benefits are a joke, lots of them apply to the office only anyways. There is close to nothing for remote workers.
Suggestions are ignored or "not worth" for the company. Of course they are not, since the employees are worth nothing too.
The money you get for doing on-call is a joke as well, considering you can't do anything than staying at home for a full week for ~550€ (before taxes)
Image
A lot better than it should be, since the image was very good before the company was acquired by secunet 1,5 years ago and the mostly internal issues did not reach customers yet. But it begins to deteriorate, as the quality of SysEleven's services gets worse.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
Not possible at all. The only possibility to make a career is to leave. Personal development is considered a time waste by the management. And of course "there is no budget". The only certifications and workshops a very few selected employees get to do, are the ones that big customers are asking for.
Everything else is learning on the job. But of course you get no time for that and are expected to do that in your private free time.
Arbeitgeber-Kommentar
Dear colleague,
We appreciate the time you took to share your thoughts about your experience at SysEleven.
We value constructive feedback, as it allows us to reflect on our practices and make improvements where necessary. Our commitment to providing a positive and inclusive work environment is of utmost importance, and your insights contribute to our ongoing efforts.
First and foremost, we are delighted to hear that you found the remote work adaptation successful and that you enjoy working with your dedicated colleagues. We are also pleased that you value our efforts of promoting a divers and inclusive work environment, which we will continue to pursue in the future.
We also acknowledge your concerns regarding the recent changes and the related communication, your work-life-balance and criticism on on-call duty, as well as your personal development and relationship to your manager. We would like to emphasize that the well-being and mental health of our employees is extremely important to us. In order to explain how to deal with rest periods, among other things, there is a mandatory work instruction in our intranet, which also addresses and answers questions and comments from our employees. If you are unable to complete tasks in time and fear serious consequences for our customers, you do not have to bear the responsibility for this alone. It is up to the managers to prioritize the work according to the available capacities in coordination with you. To do this, it is essential that you communicate in good time what you cannot do and what you think the consequences will be so that your manager can make a sound decision. The responsibility for these decisions lies with the managers, the responsibility for sharing the necessary information, with you. If you struggle to finish work, keep to your rest periods or reconcile being on call with your private life and personal needs, then your manager is the first person you should contact to work out a solution with you. If you get stuck at this point, our People & Culture team will be happy to support you.
Same goes for your personal development. There is a process that requires all managers to conduct feedback meetings three times a year. If, for whatever reason, these feedback meetings do not take place in your case, you can first point this out to your manager and request the meeting. If the attempt fails, it will help us to get a hint so that we can support you and your manager in removing the obstacles and promoting your development.
Furthermore, we are aware that communication is key to drive changes successfully. Transparency, effective communication, and addressing employee concerns are very important for us. We therefore recently conducted a pulse check survey to find out how informed our employees feel about the current changes and whether they feel able to contribute to these. With an overall rating of 8/10, we are pleased that our communication efforts so far have reached many colleagues. We have also identified topics that need to be communicated more and have already started this in our last All Hands meeting and will continue to do so in further Show & Tell meetings.
We hear you and continuously strive to create a motivating working environment. Furthermore, we know that sometimes there are times when not everything works as expected or hoped. And when more of those things pile up, everything suddenly appears in a negative light. However, we would like to encourage you to explore the reasons behind such seemingly unfortunate situations and thus make your perspective a little more colorful. For example, that spontaneous All Hands meeting on a holiday that wasn't recorded was scheduled because highly confidential information needed to be shared immediately. It doesn't always work perfectly - we know that. But we try to make the best of every situation and just as we trust our employees to give their best and are understanding of their mistakes, we expect the same from them. That is the culture we want to promote and we would be happy to find a way to work on your challenges together.
Thank you again for sharing your perspective and we look forward to a successful collaboration.
All the best
People & Culture Department