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Amsterdam; it's really all about living here.

Lunch.

Work-life balance.

After the CTO (Bank) left, company culture has fallen hard.

Incompetent people were promoted to Directors in management because smart people left the company and there was nobody senior enough to fill the void.

Most of the Product Owners are incompetent with no real-world experience.

Management subtly forces people without a future to become TLs, to do their dirty work.

Most of the engineering teams are led by designers who haven't written any code in their life. Nowadays, even copywriters are leading engineering teams :)

Flexible hours is a lie, as they will literally put your ratings to 4 (Partially Meets Expectations) or 5 (Needs Immediate Improvement) if you're late in just a few standups.

Your technical expertise holds no value here. They don't need it, and they're very open about it.

HR is completely useless and will only support management decisions.

Advice to people: Be very, very, very careful about selecting your Team Lead; it can make all the difference. Some guidelines I used to tackle that:

• Shouldn't be a designer/user-researcher/copywriter; they won't ever be able to understand your tasks.
• Should be actively involved in coding (ask his/her teammates about it, not him/her). Check git logs.
• Should've more working experience than you (check LinkedIn; if no good companies are there, it could be a bad sign).
• Should've at least 5 years of corporate experience (don't count freelancing & self-entrepreneurship ventures).
• If they talk too much random without getting to the point, it's a bad sign!
• If they put too much stress on communication then engineering, it's a bad sign.
• Should've empathy; find out how to judge that. This one's most important.

Find a good leader to lead the company.