Pros
- Coworkers - Good work/life balance - Possibility to go up quickly if you are liked - High pay for Berlin
Cons
The working environment is severely toxic. You have to quickly understand the politics of the department you work in and who you can trust. Every six months employees are rated on a bell curve which means that a certain percentage need to be set as low performers, regardless of whether they are meeting their KPIs. The decision of who will be a low performer is taken by management several months before reviews. This is usually not linked to objective performance. If you are considered a low performer you will be humiliated until you choose to go. Your team may be taken away for no reason, someone of your same level or a level lower will be put as your manager and you will be given less and less interesting work. This happens even to employees that were high performing during the past review. This instability creates a tense environment in which employees are constantly watching their backs, doubting their decisions and never feeling safe. If you are friendly with someone considered a low performer, this also hurts your career progression. It creates an ugly, competitive environment among colleagues that understand that they have to stand out more than their colleagues or bring down another colleague in order to get promoted. Aside from the working environment, there are several other things wrong: The company calls itself data driven, but this is not true. Very questionable business decisions are made because they have backing from the US office. If you speak out or question them, this is considered a negative attitude towards the company. Working with US counterparts is difficult and exhausting. The EU office is treated like a subsidiary of the US and not really allowed to make any of its own decisions. The company calls itself a flat hierarchy, but this is no longer true. The structure has become very rigid and corporate. Senior management is composed of people who are too young for the jobs they are given and not mature enough to lead teams. Most of them do not have previous management experience and this means middle management suffers. Little value is given to properly managing your team. It is more important to manage upwards than downwards. The excuse given is that “employees own their development plans” which is not true, as mentioned above, the decision on where you will be on the bell curve is taken by senior management several months before reviews. The company prefers to hire instead of promoting. You can expect to be promoted once. The entire company has a policy of “constantly raising the bar” which means that every year they hire more expensive, “better” people in management positions and employees that have been around for a year or two are considered not good enough. If you manage to stay in the company for over 2 years, most of the people that started with you will be gone. Yearly restructures: You have to be very flexible because the job you were interviewed for may no longer exist in six months and you will be randomly placed somewhere else.
