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Better avoid working for this company

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Indeed for 2 years
January 18, 2020
Tokyo, Japan
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros
  • Free lunch
  • Free snacks
  • Casual culture
  • Competitive salary in Tokyo
  • Good work-life balance (Unlimited PTO)
Cons
  • Unorganized, outdated technologies (still using Ant, still using Google Closure, code quality is not evaluated)
  • Intransparent management (prevalent favoritism, no clue on how to improve engineering quality from the top)
  • Infamously intransparent HR's way of handling harassment cases
  • Short-sighted evaluation system (they only value immediate business impact, not engineering excellence)

Some personal experience:

  • I received a bad evaluation because of my "too many comments" in code reviews. I raised concerns to my manager before making the many comments, but he ordered me to add many comments to persuade the author. I just followed my manager's order but got a negative evaluation. My acting manager could not point out which specific comments were bad; he told me the number of comments was the only problem. He also asked me to remove a sentence from my self-evaluation, which read, "I thought it was okay to make many comments because I was told so by my manager."

  • When I sought help from HR for my acting manager's harassment because I was mentally exhausted, they told me that mental tolerance differs from person to person, so bringing in a doctor's diagnosis was meaningless.

  • The tech lead on my team (the same person as the "acting manager" mentioned above) stole credit for my work by creating something that completely overlapped with what I was doing. When I pointed that out, he repeatedly ignored my comments. When I reported his disrespectful behavior to HR, HR concluded that he was just hesitant to communicate with me. He did not receive any punishment, but I was sent to a "boredom room" (another company) by Recruit, Indeed's parent company.

  • I was supposed to get a good evaluation because of my high-impact work, as my manager told me. However, Recruit determined that the impact of my work was zero, while another colleague who had less contribution than me got a plus for the same work. As a result, I received the worst evaluation (which is called "Below").

  • Recruit told me that I didn't have "respect" for others because I made too many comments in a code review and that I reported my former acting manager's ignorance.

Advice to Management

Significantly improve your HR. Focus on real management. Learn from the failures of other companies.

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