On the surface, the company looks promising. Axon, the product I worked on, is essentially a simulation platform for pharmaceutical supply chain data. However, my time at Bluecrux is full of mixed feelings stemming from deep organisation dysfunction, despite receiving the Great Place to Work certification a couple of years in a row.
Talent Exodus:
Shortly before I joined, a number of people were let go, severely impacting morale. Every few months the same process repeats itself again. This time with 10+ people across product/engineering having left the company within 6 months. Keep in mind that this is a huge chunk of the product/engineering dept.
Some key points:
- PIPs with unclear justifications and a lack of clear criteria to measure success.
- Poor performance reviews without any tangible examples when requested (resulting in end-of-year bonus withholding).
- Sudden firing of employees who are then told to stay at home.
Many others found another job due to growing feelings of discontentment and disrespect. One of which was the result of a dispute over less than €100 in monthly pay from a key-member of the engineering team. Recently, senior departures have led to “downgraded” job postings with junior/mid-level hiring. This creates huge knowledge gaps and increases pressure on remaining staff. Leadership changes in the last year have facilitated these abrupt changes: expect monthly emails from them about “team changes” (departures).
Agile Theatre:
Sprints are an unrestricted mess. A large share of tickets committed are blocked by other teams, and pushback is ignored because of prior deadline commitments to clients from sales. Technical discovery happens after deadlines are set and before the involvement of the team, guaranteeing crunch time, a feeling of a lack of any control, and frequent trade-offs due to extreme time pressure.
Retrospectives address some team friction, only to go nowhere when it is escalated. Generally, any major issues raised in retrospectives are on a management level, and cannot be rectified as ownership will not be taken. Issues identified tend to be the same management issues time and time again, until we just stop organising retrospectives.
A Hot Mess:
You will quickly learn that Axon is not a product driven company. Its roadmap is entirely defined by client contracts. On a technical level, development essentially operates under a waterfall process using Scrum ceremonies (watergile). Aside from taking up calendar space, there are none of the benefits of concrete deliverables and rapid feedback, just hard deadlines, over-promises and scope creep.
Even when you push back during planning meetings and ask a product owner if something outside of the scope is needed, the response is generally “we do not need this”. By the time the release cycle comes around, the answer to the question you asked weeks ago has changed, and we (engineering) have to hotfix full features for customers. Short term "fixes", such as customers using a non-production environment temporarily, seem very inappropriate.
Since this "process" of extreme urgency appears so often, it's only a matter of time until there simply isn't enough engineering power to develop features ad-hoc in time. It's likely that at some point soon, the expected full-feature-hotfix at the eleventh hour will not be enough, and it will inevitably miss a contractually obligated delivery.
The codebases are ailing due to both architectural and technical debt, and despite the best efforts of the team; there is simply never enough dedicated time to improve the product. Over time, this means that it takes longer and longer to work on features and fix the same recurring issues over and over again.
As a result, we have little real time to work on actual planned release items.
Design Crisis:
3 designers cycled through in a period of 12 months: all either fired or quit. One of which joined as a UI/UX specialist, and then was suddenly fired a month later in place of an external UI contractor, demoralising the team again. Product owners now handle design work despite no background in it, while major projects are partially outsourced. The result is a patchwork of UI components with no coherence or consistent theme.
Everything but the Kitchen Sink:
The Mechelen office lacks seats when at capacity, generally every Tuesday and Thursday. Engineers have been reprimanded for leaving after being forced to work in the kitchen area due to lack of seating. Solutions such as adding more desks are still insufficient. Either go remote-first instead of adding more office days, or get a larger office for Axon.
Two Products - Zero Collaboration:
Bluecrux boasts two products publicly: Binocs and Axon, however they share absolutely no resources on a functional level. The teams never interact, the codebases are even written within different technologies, and they waste money by “doubling up” on product/engineering/design resources and haemorrhages money. It effectively feels like two different companies sharing office space on occasion and is a good representation of the priorities of management.
