Owned by a conman, don't work at this place - werkgeversreview Machine Learning Engineer bij Algorithm Innovative Solutions

The illusion of a great opportunity for as long as it takes to get to your first pay day

I started with a newly setup company under the umbrella of Algorithm Innovative Solutions and Dimensions International, called Algorithm Studios. I was to be the face of the company in the US. A lot of promises were made including salary, healthcare and company stock and projects. Mohamed Kotb, the owner of the company, still owes me two months pay. The company has poor communication across the board, I spent most of my time trying to get responses out of various departments including accounting. Mohammed Kotb, the owner lies; I have long Whats App, phone call and email chains with him making promises and grand claims that were later proven wrong. I was given a couple of interesting briefs that were later undermined and subverted into areas I would never have signed up for. They have only paid me 10% of what they owe me, no stock and no healthcare. I put in a lot of work in areas that were not related to my title in order to help get the company going, only to have it all wasted as I learned what a scam it all was. I have heard from various sources that there are numerous other employees that have gone unpaid, vendors that have not been paid, and they use pirate software (Autodesk CAD). Mohammed is starting new companies and I hear he does this out of habit. I no longer expect to get paid, so it's time to help others and warn them against working with him or his organizations.

-High Salaries, ranging between 1.5x to 2.75x the market average for most. -Underground parking. -Coffee machine! (Some people just love such sort of things) -Some people are paid in USD. -Most of the work is product related.

-Very poor building and facilities even though it's located in smart village. There's no transportation facilities. Restroom is filthy and closer to a public restroom. -Extremely unstable. Average service duration time is less than 5 months. Over a duration of just few weeks, the Cairo office lost about 19 people across the board (engineering, administration, and management). Most of them were fired or forced to leave due to not paying or delaying their salary, others due to sidelining and mistreating them. -Financially unstable. Salaries are consistently delayed for weeks and sometimes months under the false excuse of attendance sheet reviews. Unfair and unexplained salary deductions. -The company operates under different names to create confusion and hide origin. Algorithm Innovative Solutions, Dimensions International, Dimensions Iconic Designs, Bites, Bites.VIP, are a few names of the same entity. -A grandiose vision with overly optimistic dreams that lacks proper planning and have zero tolerance. For example, they insist on hiring additional headcount even though funding is limited and there's difficulty in paying existing employees. An obscene amount of money is spent on outsourcing the development of secondary product features. There's no tracking of the project budget, the concept is missing. -Ethics is not a word they know about. -They systemically trick consultants, contractors, part timers, and employees to avoid paying. They keep delaying payments for extended duration and eventually either don't pay the due money at all or at least deduct significant amounts of the dues without any reason. -The managing director in Dubai is micromanaging everything, from the color of buttons in the mobile app, to the product features, to attendance and HR policies, to salary payments, etc. All decision making is centralized and such micromanagement is intentional so any attempt to introduce decentralization is doomed. -Impulsiveness, aggressiveness, and scapegoating is common. -Distracting, pointless, and unrealistic goals, e.g. requesting a full adoption of an ERP system within a couple of weeks for all of the company functions! Also in-house development of an enhancement to the installed attendance machine, allowing it to capture and attach a photo for the person checking in/out. -Quick to hire without proper assessment and quick to fire with improper accusations. Technical leadership skills is a bit weak. They are sometimes unable to identify root causes of performance problems, where poor/missing detailed design, providing misleading directions, code duplication, and assignment of the wrong type of tasks, would be the real sources of some of the individuals performance problems. -People are forced to list salary figures less then reality in contracts to evade taxes, cut social insurance, and legal liability. -They systemically lie to new candidates as well as employees about important things, including company size/structure, projects funding/budget, investment and affiliation. They keep creating fake job announcements to give the illusion of growth, at the time the company is insolvent. They lie about social insurance coverage and shamelessly lie about consistent salary delays. -They gamble with people well-being, time, and security. They trick people to get on board with so many shameless lies to strengthen the company profile/portfolio. Then they try seeking funding. If, and when, they fail, they lay them off immediately, blame them for poor performance, and very often not pay them. They effectively get people to consult and work for free this way. -They keep on switching from industry to another (BIM and MEP architectural design to software development), laying-off employees along the way.