Typeform

As most reviews pointed out already:

• The perks are among the best you could find in Barcelona.
• The product and the offices.
• The people you work with are quite good in Engineering; so many talented and skilled colleagues.
• Some people really want to make the company successful.

The amount of changes in management recently, coming from nowhere, is huge, and it's getting worse every month.

All C-levels have been replaced by friends-of-friends of other C-levels, with little to no diversity.

Some of the C-level employees lack skills like communication and emotional intelligence.

In the last months, there have been direct hires with no process. This could be okay at some point, but some of those hires have caused entire departments to vanish or disappear, mostly because of a lack of cultural fit. This has caused former employees with years of experience, valuable employees to the company, to leave.

One of those hires took more than a month for HR to act, even when lots of people were already complaining and saying that this specific person was not suitable or beneficial for the company. It took so much time for them to react that few people left the company in that time because working was unbearable.

While right now the perks look amazing, it's clear that this is not going to last for long.

Sending emails at 10 pm on the weekends, sometimes asking for you to work on something, has become more and more common.

There are almost no managers left, and the ones still around lack enough skills (or better said, up-to-date skills) to do their job properly.

The whole company relies on something called OKRs, which are supposed to be objectives to aim for. You spend a month defining them, doing meetings and presentations, just for the company to pop out a project out of nowhere that renders all that time spent useless.

Some projects are being defined and estimated by people who don't have enough domain knowledge on the product, to the point of missing important features and setting up dates that are not realistic without compromising quality on what you deliver.

There's flexible working and unlimited holidays. Some people are not making enough use of those, but others are abusing them too much, to the point of being months or weeks completely away.

Engineering lacks leadership and lacks communication between the teams that are working on different features.

You might have a team of 7-8 people for a project with low priority, while you have 2-3 engineers working with legacy and infrastructural stuff that is core to the platform.

Instead of helping those small teams to get more resources, the new hires go directly to new teams with new projects.

Once an engineering project is done, the team gets disbanded, and the ownership is lost.

No career framework.

Almost all HR has changed, to the point that only a few are keeping up to date with what they do, and they can't handle everything.

There's no help on where you want to go as an engineer.

Too many useless meetings. We have spent more time on assemblies and "clarity" meetings lately than anything else. The processes are so shady and everything is so gossipy that every time someone leaves, we have to do a company-wide meeting to explain what happened.

Lack of clarity on processes.

The few managers left and the C-levels are not listening or seeing through their employees. When they act, it's too late.

There's a huge gap between old people in the company and new hires.

The culture of the company is heading towards working more hours in the office, which doesn't mean being more efficient.

People are afraid of speaking up. It went from open forums to no one saying anything because of fear.

Listen to your employees; they are the ones who built the company, and some of them have been there for more than 3 years, not just a few months. They understand what Typeform was better than you. They have more knowledge, context, and wisdom than people who recently joined, and you listen more to them just because their salary is higher.

Stop the OKRs; they are completely useless when you don't follow or believe in them.

Get some training, either in public speaking or management.

If your idea of working at Typeform involves working on weekends or nights, be clear about it and set some expectations.

The best way of shutting down rumors or gossiping is by being clear about what you do, not sending an email that generates even more rumors or calling for an assembly where you can't speak openly without fear.

As of now, the main danger for Typeform is not its competitors; it is its management. It seems you are working really, really hard on making the company fail. Maybe you are not aware, but every week you lose someone with knowledge on something that no one else possesses. Every week the processes get worse, and the quality of what we ship gets worse. There's going to be a point of no return where the product will reach a state that recovering from it will be nearly impossible.