Great colleagues in a company which doesn't value them
Verbesserungsvorschläge
Please be honest to your workers. Humans are replaced with titles. Everything seems to be in a rush to become more professional, more corporate, but this loses the human element. As an employee I feel like in the time leading up to the announcement of the merger the perspective shifted from management looking at me as a person to looking at me as a resource. At least give us the courtesy of being honest.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
The best part are the colleagues. Without them, this would be 1/5.
Work is disorganized, tasks get lost or forgotten and the team leads are too busy to help. C-Level seem to make arbitrary decisions, but don't seem to have a good idea of what all teams are doing. Multiple times work got done only to be thrown out weeks later.
This makes work feels pointless, but the stress is immense anyway.
Kommunikation
The company preaches transparency, while not living up to their own standards. There are constant contradictions in the messaging. Information spreads through rumors mostly, so lots of times official announcements sound like damage control, only confirming the knowledge that has spread already and not one sentence more. Personally I have lost any trust in the official announcements.
As an example: In response to a question asking about layoffs during a recent all-hands meeting we were told that no layoffs are taking place. Meanwhile the company is letting work contracts expire without offering a follow-up and explaining it as a business decision to the affected. This is not layoffs in the strictest sense of the term, but it feels dishonest.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
I don't have anything negative to say about my colleagues at all, on the contrary: Every single person in my team is wonderful, and I haven't met anybody at this company who I didn't get along with. Working together is fun and collaboration is productive. There is a lot of loyalty and compassion between colleagues.
There is still some friction between the seperate pre-merger company's teams.
Work-Life-Balance
The preparation for the platform launch was gruelling, and people haven't recovered yet. A huge amount of overtime was essential for keeping deadlines, and complaints about the deadline being too soon were dismissed by the leadership without providing any solution. In the end the relevant teams were given three days of special leave for going above and beyond what their contract obliges them to and keeping the impossible deadline. After the months of stress that were behind us, this did not feel in any way adequate, especially as this didn't take into account the different levels of stress experienced by different teams. Apart from this gesture I didn't feel a lot of appreciation by the company for the incredible work done by these teams.
The stress got a little bit lighter after the launch. But not by a lot. The rush that was necessary to keep the date led to numerous issues which needed urgent fixing and many customer complaints. It feels like we're still not fully done cleaning up the mess that we were forced to make during the crunch.
Every day after work I feel drained and exhausted. I feel like an empty shell, and like this job has taken years off my life expectancy.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
My team lead is a wonderful person. They sometimes seem a little insecure in their leadership role, but nothing I would complain about. The issues start in the levels above. Communication between these layers is completely intransparent, so when you're presented with a decision there is no way of knowing if the decision was made by the team lead, the CTO, or somebody in between.
Interessante Aufgaben
Occasionally an interesting task can be found. Maybe adding a new feature, or maybe even creating a proof of concept for a new idea.
But most of the time is spent keeping legacy code alive, resulting in the older products feeling like layers upon layers of patches. Work on this is frustrating, very time consuming, and there is no time for refactoring or improving the code. Working on legacy code can be fun, but not if you're always in too much of a hurry to rework the troublesome parts and instead have to apply a workaround to a workaround to an issue your team wanted to fix for half a year but never had the time.
Gleichberechtigung
The company is working on improving this, but e.g. sexist jokes can still be heard occasionally.
People seem to put effort into using "he or she" instead of using the more inclusive singular "they".
During a recent poll the prioritization of the topics for the culture team was decided, and improving equality was ranked last out of four topics.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
I can't provide a lot of insights into this. It does not seem like loyalty to the company or long tenure will get rewarded a lot though.
Arbeitsbedingungen
The Karlsruhe office is nice and the options for working from home are as well. A monthy budget of 100€ allows employees to order equipment they need without a lot of overhead.
No complaints.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
I was appalled when the first "Teamweek" was announced. I can understand the reasoning behind it, but having all employees (remote and local) fly to a typical vacation destination, including transatlantic flights for employees from overseas, is just a horrible thing to do in the current age. I could understand doing this once for the merger. I do not understand trying to make this an annual event.
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
My salary never felt appropriate for the tasks I was given after the first month. My salary is significantly below current market rates. When the "salary bands" were introduced I was only given a negligable adjustment.
I was always given positive performance feedback, but was never granted a raise. At the moment no promotions or raises will be considered.
Image
I have not heard anything positive about the merged company. The post-merger rebranding was done half-heartedly, the "launch event" was botched, many customers still use the old name of the company in their correspondence.
Karriere/Weiterbildung
I have asked for a career progression path, but have never received any answer except to wait until the dust has settled after the merger. The latest performance review was the first time I saw an actual description of the expectations for my current position. I want to make progress and I'm willing to put in the effort, but if my team lead can't tell me what I could do better, I really don't know what else I could do.
At the moment we were told to expect no promotions or raises in the short to medium term future. So many of my colleagues deserve a raise, a promotion, or at the very least a permanent contract, and have done so for a long time, but I don't have high hopes for them either.