Workday

The CEO is really smart and awesome.

It's a big American company with an office in Dublin, Ireland, so you can have the chance to get in touch with people from all around the world.

The view from the 6th floor of the building is nice, and the snack program and employee clubs are also a nice bonus to make your day more enjoyable.

Most colleagues are friendly, and there is a lot of flexibility in managing your time.

The CEO stopped overseeing hiring a long time ago, and the quality of upper and lower management in the Dublin office is really poor (with very limited exceptions like Chris Byrne).

Tons of big policies and procedures exist for everything, with several levels of approval. They clearly don't trust their employees and want managers involved in every decision, even technical ones. Most policies are so generic they leave huge discretionary power in the hands of really poor management.

The company always says they care about you, but this is more true if you are a manager. We are all equal only when it comes to the snack program or a spot in the car park. If you are an individual contributor, you are just a resource to be allocated to a project/team every few months/weeks as they like.

The structure is very vertical, with a manager for every 3/4 people and multiple managers from different organizations with different OKRs, policies, and procedures to handle a single team.

They call management "leadership," but it's just a word; they are not leading anything. They are not providing examples, guidance, mentoring, or coaching. They only care about their goals/OKRs/objectives and not about you or your career. They tell you your career is in your hands, and they mean it literally, since they cannot care less.

There are no quantitative goals to measure your contributions/productivity and no clear path/checklist to get a promotion. It's only based on your ability to sell yourself with smoke and mirrors and become friends with upper management, not on actual quality deliverables to customers.

They run a career check-in every year as an HR compliance exercise, but it's just a one-way presentation. First, you present your achievements, then you will be given the management review, unrelated to your presentation, and with a compensation/promotion package predetermined.

If you are already good friends with upper management, you can be promoted every 6/12 months without having to prove anything, and you can also get your friends and family hired in senior roles. They call this "connections," and they really value it, but I prefer to use another name.

If you have an Irish passport, you will probably get a higher level in the company given the same level of experience in the industry, so apply for one before joining the company. They are proud of having a mix of people from all around the world in the Dublin office, but almost all of them are individual contributors. Probably in Ireland, there are a lot of managers and very few developers, testers, analysts, etc. It's clearly a coincidence.

There is a toxic culture where you are forced to comply and pretend that everything is awesome. If you try to point out a problem, you will become the problem because you clearly do not understand their magnificent work. Instead of fixing the problem, they will focus on explaining to you why you are wrong.

If you are unlucky enough to work with Xpresso for 1-2 years, your career in the real world is ended. They believe they have created (acquired) a powerful proprietary language/system that is ten years ahead of everything. Even if it's an interesting technical solution, it's clearly limited, and there is no proper tooling to support code development. There is a huge ecosystem of plugins written by devs in their spare time to improve the gaps of the language because the company does not care to have the XO team spend time improving the dev experience. They are just totally blind and full of themselves.

You are too full of yourself to understand what you are doing.

Stop playing the game where you pretend to be awesome to get more power from the HQ and try to put your hands where your mouth is.

You are running tons of surveys, and then when you don't like the results, the outcome is always "they did not understand the questions, let's explain it better and run another survey." That's not an action, it's denial. Maybe you are not as good as you think, and you should start to listen to the employees.

If you want to learn something, start to unlearn.