Founders surrounded by yes men (and women). This makes them completely disconnected from reality. According to them and the people surrounding them everything is always amazing and only getting better. However ‘on the ground’, senior people are leaving in droves (some of them even without having found a new job just because they’re so fed up), being replaced with successively more junior people.
If you can tell the founders a nice story and you are able to befriend them, you will get promoted to smithereens. The sky is the limit. Doesn’t matter if 75% of your team has just resigned, you are still eligible for a huge promotion.
Hypergrowth is the excuse for everything. Especially for introducing increasingly vague roles. Coordinators need coordinators that need coordinating. Through all these levels, the vision and priorities of the company get completely lost. This results in every new hire being more disconnected with the company and the product as the one before them.
And even after hiring all these people, no one seems to be able to actually deliver features (really, the app has been basically identical to one year ago). A bunch of things are even being outsourced to a consulting company.
Speaking of vision. Somehow everyone that’s in charge of building the vision of the product is completely out of touch with our competitors. Where a couple of years ago we might’ve been market leader in a lot of things, now there are a bunch of competitors in Europe that have a feature set that make N26 look like the old banks we are trying to replace.
The architecture is riddled with ticking time bombs (some of them with easy fixes) that the technical leadership has no clue how to fix (if they even acknowledge they exist). Instead they rather rewrite code that was recently rewritten because... I have no idea.
TL;DR: don’t waste your time here.
