Pros
BENEFITS Germans get partial refunds for the internet and work equipment. REMOTE WORK Uptempo is fully remote. There is an office in Karlsruhe, but no one has to work from there. PEOPLE Most people in the German office are friendly and supportive and you can have a nice chat with them.
Cons
I'll give a bit of background first: Uptempo (prev. BrandMaker) was initially a German company which was acquired by an American investor and was merged last year with two North American Companies Hive9 and Allocadia. MANAGEMENT Disorganized. Not efficient. Mostly men with huge egos. German and North American managers rather play political games and compete with each other than work on the common strategy and execution. After more than one year of this merge there is still no common understanding for both business and product strategy despite dozens of meetings, presentations and workshops on this topic. In general Uptempo managers will have 3 solutions for every problem: weekly status meeting, bi-weekly status meeting, daily status meeting. LAYOFFS Company joined the trend and laid off employees in September 2022. The explanation for the layoff was that after the merge company was not able to restructure the work processes fast enough, could therefore not work efficiently for many months and did some other organizational mistakes despite that fact that upper management spent hours with external consultants discussing how to organize the merge and life afterwards efficiently. Interesting enough that laid off were individual contributors, not L1-L2 managers who were not able to (guess what) manage the situation properly. PEOPLE MANAGEMENT People managers are mostly very unexperienced and afaik don't attend any trainings neither provided by the company nor privately. HR is not involved in the people development, so the managers try to do their best, but do many mistakes due to the lack of experience. Sometimes they learn from it, sometimes they don't. HR in Germany does only paper work and doesn't offer any further support for the employees. North American HR are always positive and reassuring, however here it ends for the German employees. SALARIES Salaries in Germany are below the market average. However, Uptempo offers some other benefits - see "Pros". As Uptempo doesn't have any wage scheme, there are huge salary gaps between employees doing the same work. PERSONAL GROWTH Most probably you won't grow in the German office. More and more functions and important tasks are moved to North America. Upper management also clearly stated that the company is too small to give people a space to grow. As the company doesn't focus on the employees' growth, there are not many learning opportunities or colleagues you can learn from. Managers will give you the impression that you can influence and change a lot and they will delegate their tasks to you as much as they can. However, most initiatives and changes will die unless they comply with the agenda of the upper management which is not transparent. I often found myself working hard on a topic agreed with my manager which no one needed at the end of the day. SUMMARY Most probably you'll find yourself very isolated in the German office sitting on the bench, because the main game is now played in North America and CEO is completely driven by the American investors. CEO is also the only one person based in Germany, all other Cs are based in NA which negatively affects the communication, clarity and transparency across the organization. As managers don't have the strategy and clear direction yet, your work will be pretty chaotic and with low impact.
