A poor man's Binance - Anonymous employee Huobi Employee Review

1. It was next to impossible to get the necessary support for meeting basic requirements (e.g., web support, working website links etc.), as inter-departmental communication was sorely lacking. Requests were often made multiple times before any response was received, and the responses typically raised even more questions — most / all of which also went unanswered. Needless to say, this was highly frustrating and counter-productive. 2. Senior management doesn't have its priorities straight. Their MO is to copy everything Binance does...but poorly. It wants the company to expand internationally but many of the top brass heading the international offices can't speak a lick of English. They are unable to communicate with many of their own employees and rely on those fluent in Mandarin and English to act as their translators. 3. What's truly horrific about the aforementioned situation is that it makes perfect sense when you realize senior management doesn't actually care about the employees. For instance, once the COVID-19 situation in Singapore was brought under control and there were no longer any legal limits on how many people were allowed to be in the office at any one time, those at the top started forcing everyone to return to the office nine hours a day, five days a week. They even went so far as to implement attendance-tracking via staff access cards and the company messaging app. They would note what time each employee arrived at and left the office daily, and threaten pay cuts for anyone who wasn't in the office for at least nine hours every day — an illegal act under Singapore law. 4. Managers routinely treated their subordinates poorly. It was not uncommon for annual leave applications for periods longer than one week to be rejected, with department heads saying that allowing staff to go on leave for more than a week would "affect the business". 5. Toxicity was rampant across the company, whose turnover rate was nothing short of astonishing. When employees inevitably resigned, some department heads would imply or even explicitly state in front of other staff that those employees were leaving because they had been fired or "asked to leave". This was perhaps an attempt at "saving face" on the company's behalf but thankfully, most of the employees knew better. 6. There were indeed employees who were asked to leave, but the reason for this was less their work performance and more management trying to cut costs. However, this was not as clear-cut as simply laying people off to downsize the workforce. There was at least one instance of an employee being moved to another department and told their pay was too high. Instead of quitting as they'd been expected to, they responded by saying they'd be willing to take a pay cut. Management promptly panicked, back-tracked, and laid them off — this implied that their original plan was to make the employee's working conditions so unfavourable that they would leave the company of their own accord, so the company could avoid paying them any severance. However, this plan clearly backfired. 7. When the company inevitably began haemorrhaging staff, management started hiring barely qualified replacements from China who not only had no idea what they were doing but also couldn't speak English and therefore, could not communicate with any employee who was not fluent in Mandarin. What's worse was that some of these replacements would try to boss the existing staff around, despite knowing next to nothing about what they did or how to properly handle their respective projects. When my supervisor resigned, I was interrogated out of the blue by one such replacement regarding my work and my medical leave. This person had not even bothered to introduce himself or tell me what his designation was before launching into said interrogation, which left a terrible impression on me and destroyed any chance of a healthy working relationship between him and me.