A once great company ruined by arrogance - werkgeversreview Anonieme werknemer bij Envato

- If you're not in the "cool people" club, forget about promotions or having your ideas valued. There's a clique that revolves around key figures of the leadership teams and if you're not the kind of person that likes their photos on Instagram or goes to Friday drinks with them, you're out. It's like high school. This creates disparity, inequality, unfair treatment, and obviously makes good people go away - HR is part of said clique, don't even think of going to them to ask for help for career progression—every time I needed HR they were useless and always busy preserving the status quo and covering for embarrassing mistakes made by people in leadership positions. They like to gossip and drinking on Friday, if you need something from them you may have better luck asking them when they're drunk or adding some juicy story to grab their attention - For a tech company with a well-established product, the lack of interest for the product function and the UX side of things within the company is staggering. They are ruled by short-term vision and a marketing approach of "let's bring in more customers today, tomorrow...eh, we'll see" they haven't delivered a good product in ages because all the choices they make are either based on their weird and malfunctioning "agile" processes or on marketing campaigns that lack long-term benefit. - It used to be a company where you felt like you were changing people's lives, the company values and the interests of the community were brought up during almost every meeting. Now you see these big-ego corporate-mindset arrogant leaders and the people they hired talking about "the community" but not having even the slightest idea of the kind of people that make the community, not reading the forums, not knowing their stories. They throw around the "community" thing because it makes them sound cool, but all they care about is making more money which is very different from what it used to be - It's a company for extroverts where if you know who to talk to during Friday drinks you'll get promoted, otherwise you just won't be valued at all, even if you've got amazing ideas. I've seen incredibly talented people with tons of experience not get promoted, and be outranked by others that were waaay less experienced/impactful but knew who to talk to. Those cases were revolting not only for the fact itself, but also for how the communications were handled, how the "introverts" were treated and how HR demonstrated their complete lack of care for the employees. - Don't be fooled when they tell you "there is a flat structure in this company", it's not true, hierarchy is there and well visible, it's becoming worse and worse as the company becomes more of a corporate environment. - Most leadership needs to be brought back to their senses. They seem to think that a company like this one doesn't need a product director. Product managers and marketing people are some of the most "politicking" arrogant people I've ever met, there is a poisonous attitude of "don't step on my toes" instead of "sure, let's work together" that literally goes against all the values that the company claims to live by. - I have seen people very high up in the leadership chain behave like real bullies, making fun of employees in front of the whole company, something that would have never been accepted if it had been done by someone else but because it's *them*, then it's OK....HR people were laughing and clapping along of course.