Toxic positivity, cult-like company culture, nepotism - Anonymous employee Bolt Employee Review

1.0
Apr 24, 2025
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Great health/insurance package, perks, monthly 75€ allowances and sabbatical leave after 4 years. - Office snacks, nice and comfortable office spaces. - Some teams are extremely skilled, doing their best job to help the company grow. - Company used to hire people with little to no experience, giving fresh graduates good head start at working in tech/startup sector.

Cons

- Serious business decisions affecting employees’ well-being, life and workload are being made without any consultation, discussion or any input from/of those employees. I remember many times starting my workday unable to eat my breakfast and was so busy that I couldn’t eat my lunch. - Opaque decision-making, nepotism, favouritism exist at the top level of the management and make it difficult to understand and predict how you are going to work in the next 6 months. - People who don’t have relevant background suddenly comes into the important positions abroad and starts cutting costs, changing procedures willy-nilly, putting whole company culture, employee productivity and business at risk. - Toxic positivity throughout the company is pervasive, there is a cult-like environment and some teams have psychology of 14 year olds or showing similar behaviours to gangs/tribes. There is a serious need of company-wide cultural trainings, trainings about passive-agressiveness, professionalism and inclusion. - Company itself does not encourage its core values, even constructive criticism is discouraged, or at best ignored. - There is no positive correlation between work experience and salary, pay is low compared to industry average in general. Specifically, engineering teams are frustrated given how much workload they have got, therefore expect many glitches, problems and issues when you start working. - Poor career opportunities, it is not the skills that will make you to be promoted but how good you are at corporate BS.

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Bolt Response
1y
Thank you for taking the time to share such detailed feedback and for the years you spent at Bolt. We're genuinely sorry to hear that your experience didn’t reflect the kind of environment we aim to create. We're glad you found value in the benefits, the office environment, and the teams you worked with. At the same time, we hear your concerns around decision-making, communication, leadership, and team culture. We’d appreciate it if you could share more. You can reach us directly at glassdoor.feedback@bolt.eu.

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5.0
Aug 12, 2025
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CEO approval
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Pros

Supportive and approachable team members, meaningful projects that contributed to real business goals, exposure to cross-functional collaboration, opportunities to work with modern tools and tech, and a strong culture of innovation.

Cons

Pace can be fast for newcomers, limited long-term opportunities for interns, time zones sometimes made coordination challenging.

1.0
Oct 16, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

There aren’t many pros anymore. The jobs come from ezcater who hires Bolt and other companies.

Cons

So many cons… Not fully transparent, much like a typical staffing agency that collects a lot and doesn’t want to pay much to the employees. You literally have to hold out until they add bonus after bonus, done in $7 increments, and starting at $19. It appears other drivers have learned to hold out until the offer increases to $30-$45 on average after bonuses are applied. Initially, offers were at least $25 minimum. They claimed the decrease was due to them not getting more jobs. They’ve pushed more jobs out since then, but the starting pay remains low. A customer told me they typically pay $50 for delivery fees and that does not include a driver tip. If a driver is tipped they will not know about it through Bolt. They hired GigSafe for their onboarding process within the past year and they are AWFUL at it. GigSafe sends premature messages saying your account is deactivated when your document (car insurance or motor vehicle report) is about to expire. They have deactivated my account for this same reason once without any notice that they needed an updated document. Customer service at GigSafe is very sensitive and will respond to you in a snarky way. Bolt does not really have customer service. You’re lucky if you can get someone to respond back in a timely manner when there is an issue, like late or missed payments and to add the last-minute bonuses they mention, which are now done EVERY single day…[BONUS ALERT]. You have to pay $20 to another third-party company (YardStik) for a MVR if you do not upload your own. The back and forth contact when issues arise will make you feel like it is a full time job. It’s mainly due to them not having solid processes. VERY supplemental income so have something else lined up for steady pay.

5
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