N26 reviews

The product org is the biggest joke I've seen in my entire career. Everything has OKRs and KPIs, none of them match the current company direction. If you don't hit these numbers, nothing will happen: no accountability whatsoever. Several initatives even go into the opposite direction of their KPIs, but if you think that stops anybody from continuing them - you're wrong, some people even get a promotion for that performance. As a result everybody just does the bare minimum of changing colors, merging buttons, adding icons or somehow changing layouts that a poor UX person can put it on their CV for their upwork profile. Nobody, starting from the CEO and the CPO has a clue what to do with the product. One day we want to do multi-banking and multi-accounting, the other day trading and savings, tomorrow crypto and insurances. In the end we just want to play catch-up with Revolut, which we are behind half a decade in feature development. We have the highest product to tech people ratio in the industry, yet nothing they can come up with is in the slightest sense innovative or ground breakingly unique as a differentiator. Even the app from Sparkasse has more features than N26 and delivers more per quarter. If you look at the background of our product people, several of them actually come from customer service from some kind of career progression path. Because chatting with people over a coffee is really all qualification you need for you to do product management here. The result is that they make the funniest and most ridiculous decisions - mostly driven by the product director bros that have not the slightest clue of what it takes to be a director but always give you a cool bro excuse on why the don't do the thing that makes the most sense. A common excuse PMs bring is that they are being micro managed by Valentin, especially here on glassdoor, but the reality is that they just really suck as product managers. Frequently you find PMs going to conferences to talk about the bleeding edge sh*t they don't do at work in order for them to secure their next gig at some other startup. Compliance is a total joke department, the first thing they introduce is waterfall software development so some banking operation dude with no technical background (probably originating from customer service) can micro-manage every line of code that's being released to production. Apparently it reduces risk when you can't ship anything anymore. Instead of fixing real compliance issues, they focus on writing 40 page processes that nobody can ever adhere to, implement or inspect. Security is a total cr*p show, the best security people they have are some kids with an AWS certification on how to define a VPC with security groups and due to that are super arrogant. Similar to Compliance they want to review code and "security test" every little piece of code MANUALLY before it goes into production (yes, you have to wait three weeks for them to look at it, plus another to test before you can release). The best they can find is that your JSON parser throws exceptions when it's getting malformed input - thanks for wasting everybodies time without any added security to the product. AML (the department that should fight fraudsters and money laundering and such) is a lead by a recent grad that apparently wrote a couple of sentences in his master thesis about it. Feedback culture is, after the PM org, the second biggest joke here. Everybody needs to constantly gather feedback from random people to improve themselves or get a promotion. In reality, you obviously ask your best friends to give you good feedback and then half of the company spends at least six weeks in calibration sessions, reading out loud what your friend has given you for a feedback and how that compares to that other dude that got feedback from his friends. Then in some elusive round of important people, they decide based on your name and your friends feedback whether to give you nothing, a 0.5% raise or a promotion with no salary increase ("acting" they call it). To top if off, there are constantly engagement surveys going around to make sure everybody is happy. If you wonder whether there is any change coming out of these surveys? Nope. They completely stopped after the last time, where they gave away free chocolate during Christmas to show that they care about you as an employee. Instead every team now has to come up with a set of actions on how to improve things. As you can imagine, the number one complaint is that our C level completely sucks - which obviously doesn't get fixed - as well as the other things you complain about. Feedback culture at N26 is completely broken and a waste of everybodies time. If you read other reviews, maybe you have read about Kurzarbeit (furlough). Effectively it was a huge layoff program of several hundred people. Anyone sent off was already circulating in low performer lists for a couple of weeks before the decision was made official. The crisis was apparently the right time and trigger to scam the German social security fund for some social security money to send these people off for an infinite vacation. If you read it while you're on KA, you are definitely not coming back ever: find a new job ASAP. Fret not, all the money we're saving and raising due to that is spent every month in a six digit marketing budget, excluding the enormous salary that the new Marketing Director from Uber gets from doing nothing all day. Since the crisis all hiring is frozen, yet people leave in masses. There is not a single week going by without a "goodbye" email. This happens in waves, so every year you can count on the full company to completely replace itself: you rarely find anyone working here for longer than a couple of months. The obvious result is that we have to promote inexperienced people into roles they are no fit for, again causing more people to leave. On top of the usual half-a-year re-org attempt to fix the broken matrix organization, we constantly have to merge teams to keep them somehow functional. Oh right, if you think that would cut the workload somehow, reprioritize initiatives or extend the timeline expectations? Not at all, Valentin will personally blame you and your team for not delivering. Due to that chaos, it's absolutely impossible to do changes that are bigger than changing the color of a button or a adding some logos. All big projects (which for granted have great project managers) fail or get cancelled half-way through because nobody is capable to deliver them. Everybody involved in the process feels entitled enough to say "no" to anything, starting from PMs that see their OKRs at risk, armchair architects whose sole education comes from Martin Fowler blogs (no wonder, half of the company is actually working at Thoughtworks or worked there in the past), low-light tech leads that don't want to do additional work and then the usual compliance and security people that want you to not change a single thing ever. The bias for inaction really sucks the lifeblood out of everybody and makes people refrain from doing anything that improves things. Working from home is a constant topic that comes back up every week and in every Q&A session. Apparently everybody becomes more innovative when they sit together in meetings instead of using Hangouts, at least that's the latest narrative that Valentin and Max want you to believe. I'm always wondering how they have so much time to micromanage everybody back into the office when they could also tackle real problems of their company. Looking at the recent history before everybody had to work from home, I have a hard time to understand how anybody at this company is innovative in the slightest sense. In the past, this caused the whole building to be out of meeting rooms all the time. To top if off, they were so concerned about the health and safety that they filed restraining orders against their own employees (!) to make sure they can't vote for an electoral board of a works council. The whole communication and reasoning around it is beyond doubt the most ridiculous narrative I've seen in my entire life. Thankfully the press covered it properly, so stay away from such a company and I can only hope that everybody working here is leaving as soon as possible.

A lot of the problems at N26 are because of the incompetence of the C-level as leaders of a large organisation. Nepotism is rife, especially in the upper ranks — the most important factor in getting a position is not competence/experience — it's who you know. This is bad for the company — the best people, if they've not played the politics game, do not get to become the decision makers. Instead, the ranks are filled with yes-men (and women) who'll toe the line of senior management on all issues. As other reviews have mentioned, there have been several high-profile departures of the N26 veterans from both the product team and tech teams. When asked about this, the CPO said in an AMA (paraphrasing) "They were not good enough for us". These people, who were instrumental in taking the startup to where it is now, left in large part because they were unhappy with the direction the company is taking. This direction is basically: get VC money with promises of growth, launch an unfinished, unfocused, half-baked product in a new market, be surprised when it doesn't pan out, repeat ad infinitum. Prime example of this: 6 months ago, all the hype was about the UK launch. Now, UK customer numbers/metrics are so far behind the initial projections that now, there is absolutely no mention of the UK market by the C-level. The reason for this: Monzo is so good because of their laser-sharp focus on the UK market. Now the big thing is the US launch. There has been plenty of effort to drum up fake excitement in the ranks about launching a sub-par product in the US. This is bound to be a failure: The competitors have a much more focused, more feature packed products whereas we will soon move on to preparing for launching in Brazil (where Nu bank is dominant already with a great product). When asked about this growth over product mindset, the CPO's response was basically "You're wrong" (she actually said this but just with in more words "I'll challenge your belief that we're neglecting existing markets"). This mindset of ignoring problems is actually a lot broader and there are several other structural issues which stem from this that I'm not covering here. An example: Our internal employee survey has been tanking for a few quarters and there has been no concrete response from the management (other than a lavish offsite for upper management). When you ask questions in AMAs with C-levels, the response is very much like a politician being confronted with a policy failure: They deny that there was a failure, and if there was, it's due to external factors. Mostly though, they claim that everything is rosy and if you think it isn't, then the problem is with you and not the company. Concrete numbers on this: When asked "How likely do you think that this internal company survey will lead to actual change", some teams had an "agree" score of less than 20%. Oh well. There are other problems as well: The hierarchy is rigid with several levels of management, one above the other. While being a tech company, the people in the broader tech organisation have basically no say in the direction of the company and are generally looked upon as second class citizens. This shows: our deployment pipeline breaks often and outages in live, customer facing services are frequent. A lot of developer time is wasted trying to fight the deployment process. Our tech onboarding process is a joke. The CEO still interferes directly with Product teams, not trusting them and not working based off of user-research data. The cofounder keeps chanting the mantra that we need to recruit and retain the best people, but they're paying really poor salaries, especially in tech (some of my colleagues have left the company and ended up with 25% raise). They've only introduced ESOPs now and with really archaic vesting conditions (what about people who've been here for two years already? They've lost out on the highest growth phase). The office is poorly connected and the move was planned so badly that less than a year after moving, there's no space left. Meeting rooms are perennially booked so people end up having meetings in the kitchen, terrace etc. The promotion cycle is rigid and requires two weeks worth of work to produce the 'promotion-packet'. And on and on and on. The laundry list of problems is huge but the bigger problem is that management is unwilling to tackle these problems.