Hugging Face

• Amazing colleagues who are most people really passionate about their work, very good at it, and very eager to learn about what each and everyone is doing. You will learn a lot from your colleagues for sure.
• Projects that are open source. If you're in the open-source team, all your work will be visible and get great exposure. You’ll also be able to promote it on social media.
• Because it's open source, you will get the possibility to collaborate with external world class researchers.
• You're at the center and the forefront of the "AI revolution", which is pretty exciting.
• Pay of an above average French tech company (probably not on par with GAFAM though).
• Possibility to work from all over the world.

• Isolation: Almost no one, except for the manager, knows what you are doing on a day-to-day basis.
• Unlimited paid time off is great, but in practice the amount of work can encourage people to work on weekends or very late at night. No one is there to make sure you’re not working too much.
• There's an excessive focus on metrics like GitHub stars and social media engagement (X and LinkedIn posts), rather than the actual quality of projects.

Management lacks essential soft skills and exhibits several problematic behaviors:

• Imposes unrealistic and arbitrary deadlines for no reason.
• Adds stress during the trial period reminding you that you're being evaluated. Even after successfully completing tasks, management demands to "see more", claiming harder tasks are necessary before validation.
• Needs you to be obedient.
• Engages in excessive micromanagement, asking for constant task-time estimates and justifications for any delays.
• Compares your performance to long-established employees.
• Fosters competition by introducing a leaderboard that ranks employees in real-time based on the number of issues closed or addressed.
• Sends negative written feedback without prior discussion.
• Justifies toxic behavior by claiming it's part of the company culture, emphasizing that "expectations at HF are very high".
• Lacks a long-term roadmap, with roles and project expectations constantly shifting.

After three months, my trial period was extended with the explanation that I “was doing great, but they needed to see a stronger progression curve”. My trial was ultimately terminated during the very last week legally allowed, after five months of work and multiple successful and ongoing projects.

The team’s manager made this decision unilaterally, without any prior discussion or notifying the rest of the team. This decision added to their workload. After being fired during a one-on-one meeting, no one reached out to me for more than a week. I had to contact upper management to organize meetings and provide feedback.

Please make sure employees are treated fairly. Very young engineers are promoted to manager positions because they are good technically without consideration for whether they have the skills to manage people effectively.

Invest in proper management training for your managers and allocate more resources to HR. They can protect your employees from harassment and burnout.

Regularly hold meetings with employees to discuss their experiences with their roles and management. Make them feel supported by the organization, rather than vulnerable to the whims of a single manager who holds all the power over them.