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No work-life balance. Management only cares about your work, not you

Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Revolut for 1 year
May 1, 2020
London, England
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros
  • Competitive salary and benefits
  • Talented people
  • Some nice perks
Cons

A lot of pressure is going on in the engineering area.

Developers blame each other when someone accidentally breaks the dev environment/branch, making them feel shame rather than helping and stopping the blaming in the chat group.

No mistake is acceptable. If you are good in everything, you get only a 50% performance review (which is 'meets expectation'). They raise the employee standard but lack engineering processes and good culture. (They expect all of you to be 'above' expectation).

No work-life balance; everyone works like 10+ hours a day to 'Get things done'. There was no real task estimation. The product side is very keen to push their product because they are racing each other to prove themselves and to show off to their CEOs. Most people left because of that.

They are doing task demos every 1-2 weeks and gathering all developers (100+ people) to watch what every team is doing. This is not necessary anymore when the company has more than 100+ people in the tech team. It's kind of a waste of time, and I don't think everyone can remember what is going on.

There was no engineering manager position that could solve and make decisions on technical sides. As a developer, you report to the product owner in your team (which is very bad; some product owners don't even care about engineering processes; they just want to 'Get things done'). You also have a functional manager (which is some developer who has more seniority). But they can only help you with some advice for implementation.

They used to have a QA department, which is good, because if your team and product get bigger, they should have someone who creates and is responsible for quality assurance. But then they decided to collapse it because they thought focusing on 'pushing' features was more important.

Since there is no QA department, sometimes you and your team will get assigned some bugs and complaints directly.

Not a very friendly environment. When everyone was still working in the office, no one talked to you if they didn't want some answer related to work (because they have a lot of workloads and try to 'get things done'). Some people go have lunch together, but that's all.

Even after all of the above complaints, CEOs and top management still say that since the company got bigger, we are starting to get lazy (What?! Everyone needs to work long hours for you guys every day just to be enough?).

Rather than trying to encourage/help and give constructive feedback to employees who underperform in some points, they probably fire you because they don't have time for that; they want to 'get things done'.

Advice to Management

Please rework all the culture in the workplace, creating a friendly environment where people work together as a team. Stop pushing only to get things done. Give more time for engineers to estimate their tasks and respect what needs to be done. Stop blaming cultures and stop trying to get rid of people.

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