Senior Software Engineer • Former Employee
Pros: Free snacks, drinks, gym, and game room in the SF office. Some associates can work remotely.
Cons: This small company used to be considered as FinTech. Now it is actually a tiny bank with the merger of Radius Bank. It does not have any high tech at all in reality. The company claims that it uses AI/ML techniques in their loan approval process and actually it is completely a false statement just to attract investors.
The company has the following issues:
* Middle management is really bad. When this company just started, it had some good people; later on, the company busted due to the collapse of P2P business and the majority of those good employees left. Those who couldn't find better jobs elsewhere stayed and became managers after several years. A lot of them have very low technical skills and management skills. The only reason they are in the management level is purely due to the fact that they stayed in this small company long enough.
* Employee working titles are inflated. From a qualifications perspective, a VP/Senior Director/Director in LendingClub is equivalent to a Senior Analyst/Junior Analyst/Entry Analyst in Big Four Banks, respectively. A lot of so-called VPs cannot even find an individual contributor role in Big Four banks with their low qualifications. However, they like to be bossy in front of people and a lot of the time they are laughed at by the employees in the back for their stupidity.
* A toxic and unethical working environment. A lot of managers have no ethics at all and they do not care about company interests but only their personal interests. They will hire their friends with low qualifications. For example, one SVP hired his friend who is in retirement mode and constantly makes huge mistakes costing the company a lot of money. And this SVP will collaborate with other managers to hide a lot of his mistakes by not facing the root cause but blaming other people.
* HR is just a joke. HR is just for show and it cannot take any true feedback from employees. HR is also very busy because of the high attrition of employees. Even HR knows that some managers are very bad but it does not take any action to correct the bad managers' issues. They will try to protect managers over the employees as much as possible, which leads to more and more good employees leaving. Even HR itself has a high turnover rate.
* The leadership team does not tell employees the truth. The leadership team hid the true financial health of the company from its employees and kept telling employees everything was doing great. Actually it kept cutting employee bonuses, laying off good people while at the same time the leadership team collected fat bonus checks by themselves.
The employee morale is very low and good people are looking for opportunities to exit as soon as possible. All in all, with interest rates keeping hiking, LendingClub is going nowhere in the near future. Stay away from this company.