Used to be great - Engineer Personio Employee Review

We once had a great culture but this has died in the past 6 months. We no longer live up to our values, and there are so many strange things happening very suddenly that don’t make any sense. Many surprises, but definitely not good ones. Everything is presented with big smiles as great news, but it’s completely tone deaf. So many people have been fired, have quit or are planning to quit. We were all rated down in the recent performance reviews with expectations changed last minute. The mood has never been this bad. The founders are completely absent and I’m not sure if they know the extent of the problem. A new executive joined from a large US social media company and they have completely upended the culture in Product and Engineering. They already hired more than 50 people from the same company and we are now opening an office in the US. People who were junior there are joining as Directors at Personio. I expect the plan is to replace all of us who built the company, and in fact we have already lost a couple of our founding employees. A lot of people are wondering why Personio, a company that manages the personal data of almost a million employees in Europe, would hire so many people from a company infamous for promoting fake news, helping to rig elections and caught sharing personal data with companies like Cambridge Analytica. It doesn’t make sense.