MeisterLabs 

Software 

GmbH

Unternehmenskultur

It has been fun for a long time. The team sticks together, the office is beautiful and Meister organizes fun events.
The atmosphere has deteriorated since layoffs started in 2022. Now, there have been so many waves of "restructuring", "rightsizing" etc. and regular (about monthly) terminations that people either leave on their own terms, people have become numb and disassociate or they keep their heads down because they fear that they will be next. There are now more cases of diagnosed or suspected burn-out.
To add a bit more context to the layoffs: I believe no department has been spared so far and in almost all cases, layoffs were not performance-oriented (people with the highest sales numbers and the best performance evaluations were also laid off).

Meister has a high number of individuals with excellent communication skills. However, this is no longer seen as important for leadership positions as it used to be (e.g., verbal aggression from high-level executives to lower management, a high-level executive calling mental health "the responsibility of individuals" rather than the company during mental health awareness month, HR denying that there would be more layoffs when lower management asked for help on dealing with the anxiety in their departments and teams etc.). I want to be clear that in comparison to other companies, Meister at least communicates and often does so well. However, it seems that this is no longer deemed essential, which leads me to assume that things will go downhill.

What makes Meister a great company are the individual team members. For a long time, people were hired not only for their skills and experience, but also for cultural fit and that paid of. It's easy to get along with your colleagues, they are smart, fun and usually really kind people.

It really depends. There are people with weeks of overtime and others work exactly their contractual 38.5 hours per week. Meister is at least sticking to the law and you can use the hours you've built up as overtime, also entire days or weeks.

For the longest time, Meister has been struggling to define where they want to go, which go-to-market strategy to follow and which target groups to address. This has led to a constant flip-flopping from one approach to another leading to many cancelled projects just before the finish line, high opportunity costs and frustration among the team. In combination with micro-management from top-level executives, this is a difficult situation to be in.
The lack of a strategy has been pointed out numerous times, but was never taken seriously. Instead, external consultants have been brought on. Their opinion was valued a lot higher than the opinion of entire teams of seniors. Meister now prefers to hire individuals from other SaaS companies in the productivity and collaboration space that come with "a playbook". It seems to me that the assumption is that just because the person worked at the competition, they automatically know more than any other person at Meister (no matter their seniority or experience) and that whatever was done at a competitor's, can be easily implemented at Meister and will automatically work. Obviously, this hasn't worked.

The work can be very exciting as the individuals you work with are very talented. What's less exciting is the constant stop-and-go motion due to frequent strategy changes, micromanagement or general fatigue after another round of layoffs.