Toxic work environment, immature leadership, actions not in line with so-called growth vision - Anonymous employee Chocolate Platform Employee Review

* (Lack of) Core values: a company that doesn't have core values is an early warning about the maturity of leadership. The warning turns out accurate since the company has a very toxic work environment and a confused culture, and it seems they don't stand for anything. There's a trust deficit clearly visible between leadership, management & teams, and it's run like a “Lala” company! * Leadership: The CEO lacks charisma and communication skills, and ends up looking awkward when he does “theoretical” things like story telling or introducing that (joke of a) company song. But instead of focusing on his own role & improving, he still prefers to be cynical of people, and micromanage every layer in the engineering organisation. CEO often bypasses managers and gets through to people directly, giving contradictory instructions, micromanaging and creating confusion. This is not only intimidating for the engineers, but also puts managers in an awkward situation. On instances where the CEO communicated with the staff, it was handled very unprofessionally (making 1:1 communication public, public shaming, sarcasm, sly comments) and his immaturity came through. Employee feedback is not taken in the right spirit, and people who provide feedback are hounded. I perceive this is due to the big egos of leadership, they tend to take feedback as a personal attacks. Overall, I was very disappointed in the quality of leadership here, and I think they are doing a lot of damage to the organization they founded. * Communication: the way communication is handled is horrendous. Senior management lacks the courage to communicate transparently. Decisions are made but management is extremely reluctant in communicating anything over email, they procrastinate till the communication itself becomes redundant. Employees get to know about important things by word-of-mouth, creating awkward situations & confusion. This is seen not just for things which touch an employee's life, but day-to-day work decisions too. Some examples: a. Getting to know of a workplace policy change from the office housekeeping staff instead of HR/Admin b. The entire staff silently loses their accrued leave for previous year because the company doesn't maintain leave records and doesn't trust the records maintained by managers. There's no communication whatsoever on it. c. Last minute refusal to accept receipts for tax deduction leading to drop in employee take-home salary, because management didn't consider it important to inform employees about the changes due to audit recommendations and impact on employees d. Bypassing QA for some projects at the highest level, without intimating people concerned * High stress environment: Being an internet company, a fair bit of stress is expected and days rarely go as per plan. But what is worse is the additional stress that is created by leadership because of their trust issues. Engineers are forced to deliver to ridiculous estimates provided by people who have no clue of what all it'll take to do something. Resources often end up working in fire fighting mode and are hardly given any credit for it. Rather, they are pushed even harder on planned tasks. Systems lack even the most documentation, which makes it hard to understand background while troubleshooting issues. Irony is that if you take initiative here to jump-in for critical issues here, you get penalized for it. They organize Hackdays where people work on their routine projects, but are expected to put in more hours. This is very different from other companies where Hackdays are for encouraging innovation and new ideas/prototypes to surface. I personally thought that the term Hackday was being misused here to evoke passions & have people put in long hours, which I thought was manipulative. * No respect & care for employees: Employees are confronted in public by management, and pulled up in front of their peers. Management meetings often turn ugly if managers question decisions by seniors, or reasons for doing stuff, or dare to say No for anything. Information on employee performance & compensation which is supposed to handled with confidentiality is discussed with people who have no need to know it. Employees are often (literally) forced to stay late on a short notice and work on weekends, without being given any compensatory off. Employees are judged and publicly maligned if they are not available during non-work hours, due to their personal commitments . In summary, there's no respect for people or their personal time. The focus is on treating them as labor and squeezing the most hours out of them. Training and employee growth are not even in the picture, since the basic work environment itself is so dismal and unethical. * Lack of process maturity: Most processes are recently introduced. Most people who worked on the systems are no longer with the company and documentation is non-existent so it's hard to get context on why things are the way they are. Latest agile tools are used, however the development methodology is more like waterfall, the only Agile practice being the daily stand-up and the (inaccurate) fancy terminology used. Leadership is not committed to maturing processes, so any and all kinds of processes are seen as an overhead. Technology processes are put in place, but then are publicly bypassed by the favorite few. * Employee policies & benefits: they aim at hiring employees from top-tier software product companies but employee benefits fall way short. > No group/life/disability insurance for employees, other companies usually cover for 1-2X of the annual CTC. > Medical insurance cover is very low, and doesn't serve any practical purpose in an expensive region like Delhi NCR. > Day-to-day policies & processes reflect a strong mistrust on employees. > There is no cab facility, and parking in the building has to be paid for by employees at exorbitant rates. They run a shuttle between the Metro station and office. > Free lunch and dinner is provided, but quality is dismal. > No free snacks. > Employees are not allowed to bring food to the working area, but these rules don't apply to management. > No proper toilets in office > They claim they have flexible timings and allow WFH, but managers are pushed to closely monitor in/out time and productivity during WFH. > The business has been running for 5 years, however they still don't have bare basics in place, there are no systems for leave tracking, and even payroll. All this creates an unnecessary administrative burden on managers. > Feedback on employee experience is seen as revolt and the (proverbial) messengers are (proverbially) shot * No moral compass: As an employee, you often see actions around you that are unethical or unprofessional or immoral. Even if you report these instances, they are hushed up and no action is taken. It reaffirms that the leadership/management cares about just cost reduction/profit increase, and has no sense of right or wrong. * Vision: They started expanding their team since 2013, and their vision was to put in place best practices and quality checks that are necessary with a medium sized technology team. This was the hiring pitch with which a lot of senior technical members were hired. However, at the leadership level, there doesn't seem to be a buy-in for the additional overhead that comes along with more people, processes, and leadership passes a lot of stress down due to this. There seems to be a conflict between leadership & senior management on this, which ends up confusing the engineering team. Without consistent action, the company's so-called growth vision is just wishful thinking. In the last 3 months, a lot of senior people on the technical team have quit due to this Farce. In summary: If you're fresh out of college or in initial stages of your career, you'll find the environment very thrilling, to bypass processes and change stuff in Production. You'll learn a lot too. However, if you're an experienced professional, the lack of best practices and being asked to take action without thinking things through is likely to make you very uncomfortable and working here could ultimately be detrimental for you. The toxic Lala company culture might also get to you eventually. People join startups due to vision, people and growth, and all of these are major issues here. So, my recommendation would be to avoid.