Meritocracy out, politics in
Contributors are now rewarded based on connections and fake feedbacks in a truly political game because most of the managers are either busy with meetings all day long or they are clueless about what is like to be a software engineer since they never used this hat.
Lowered hiring bar
In order to throughput more engineers to even out the metrics for the constant outflow of good engineers the hiring bar decreased considerably. N26 is a hiring factory rather than a software factory and of course, quality is sacrificed for the sake of quantities. Worry not, at the end of the day you are just another number in a spreadsheet.
Non-competent people in key positions
N26 developed a keen eye for putting the wrong people in key positions. This applies to all levels of the internal food chain (Tech Leads that have zero soft skills or don't know how to communicate with humans, Managers that just deliver Google Slides and book meetings, as well as engineers in principal positions that just use their title or former companies experiences to harass others that challenge their ideas and if one wants to bring value).
If you like a political game and your surname are either Targaryen, Lannister or Stark, N26 is the place for you.
Office Management
Workspace is a joke.
You see shiny pictures of fancy meeting rooms and dogs all over the place on the web. Dog-friendliness is accepted with rules. Fancy meetings rooms no longer exist and most of the people depicted in the photos are mostly former employees.
In summer months, don't expect any Air Conditioning to bring the workplace to an acceptable temperature, but you can get a hand fan if you are lucky enough. (I said a hand fan, not a USB one).
Side note: The Founders' rooms have individual AC units blowing up the hot air away into the engineers working area.
Forget everything you know about ergonomics and posture since you are bound to sit in desk set in the common-agreed height as for your 2m or 1.60m tall colleague. Good luck with that. But I think now that correlates with the number of people asking for painkillers in the chat conversations.
Pile of Tech Debt / Low Throughput
Putting new software in Production is extremely slow. Obtaining the Pendulum of Doom in WoW a 10x faster/easier. That is due to environment instabilities that occur on a daily basis as well the cumbersome amount of paperwork and approvals required to do so. For a company that claims to be agile, that is unacceptable.
Lower environments are playgrounds for engineers working in the platform. That translates into instabilities that impact every single team in the company every single day. Developer productivity is overall low, given the headcount.
