Luminance AI

On the whole your colleagues are brilliant, friendly, intelligent young men and women.

The product is pretty good.

The company takes security very seriously (in the right sort of way).

If you ask for things, you'll often get them (though you might have to shout a bit, and email the right people).

Lots of nice extras, like pastries most mornings, free drinks and snacks, and a really brilliant coffee machine.

Also there was always a huge amount of effort (and money!) put into the Christmas and Summer parties.

Management did make (or at least appear to make) very genuine efforts to address issues raised by employees, but see below.

There are a few people at Luminance who have an absolutely outstanding technical knowledge.

They were also usually the ones too busy to impart much of this knowledge as they were invariably overworked.

I found the company to be understanding if you had issues or needed time off for some reason or another.

Really powerful and new MacBook pros were given to all tech employees, so there was almost never any performance-related issue with hardware in the tech team.

Tech talks were given by employees most weeks.

Most technical people at Luminance fall into one of two categories: micromanaged to Pluto and back or chaotically left to get on with things.

For the majority of my time at Luminance I was in the former category, without sufficient access to perform my job effectively and with a painfully difficult process to get important changes approved.

Salaries were erratic and often not reflective of someone's ability or effect on the company (in both directions). Employees also regularly talk about and compare salaries which I don't think is normal and certainly isn't healthy.

I think the reason was that the starting salaries were so random (I knew people of similar abilities who started on £27k and £45k) that people often felt the need to get things off their chest.

Management would make promises and break them. They made a huge proportion of the tech team redundant one day, brutally, and lacked the spine to tell us as a group, instead breaking people into smaller groups so as to avoid proper accountability.

This was mere weeks after every employee had been assured of their jobs (when a few people had been made redundant for more genuine performance-related issues).

Managers had been forcefully given a quota to make redundant. Rumours implied that this was to appease a certain potential investor who didn't invest in any case.

Managers were very often held to no account at all (most of them were pleasant enough but many of them had areas of incompetence that should have been properly addressed).

Sales people got all the glory and got lavish bonuses and dinners and rewards, when it was often a majority technical win. Sales would promise on non-existent features and leave it up to developers to sort out.

This was largely caused by a CEO who was essentially head of sales and had little actual interest in the rest of the business.

There was an unpleasant and militant group of so-called "feminists" who screamed inequality regarding work tasks, when in reality a lot of the males in the company had just as unpleasant tasks but just got on with their jobs, never saying a word.

This often was the dominant conversation at lunchtime and at pubs after work and was done in a very condescending way from the feminists involved.

I should defend the company here saying that in my opinion there was no discrimination at all, at least in the tech side of the business, and the hiring figures backed this up (in fact unfairly so to the girls' advantage).

At one equality meeting the company held, one of the feminists suggested that the tech hiring rate should be 50/50 M even though the female applicant rate at the time was at 15%!

Thankfully, this was immediately shot down by the head of legal, who pointed out that hiring quotas such as that are illegal.

Manage the managers better! Employees should also know the manager a level above their manager, and managers of managers should honestly ask people two levels below how they are, and not try and dismiss concerns. Things should be addressed face on, rather than passing the buck ad infinitum.