Great promises, shallow reality - werkgeversreview Anonieme werknemer bij Refurbed

MISSION / IMPACT - Company speaks a lot about its environmental impact, yet the actual actions feel extremely shallow - there is some positive outcome to be fair (if you really have to buy electronic device, then refurbished one would be in many cases indeed a better option than buying a new one), but the deeper you go into analyzing full context of the business model, source of the devices etc, the less meaningful and positive it becomes. If you care about details - feel free to search where big batches of refurbished electronics come from. - Noticeable clash of interests between business and sustainability goals, where profit takes the lead. Company likes to divide consumption into bad and good one when it's convenient. Criticizing consumption via public marketing actions doesn't prevent them from celebrating Black Friday ("At refurbed, we turn Black Friday Green..." - says their commercial on the website), participating Green Friday and any other that will come in handy when it comes to increasing sales. Company openly criticizes some anti-sustainable practices of popular brands, yet promotes their products everywhere, because of their profitability (check refurbed front page or any of their commercial). On the other hand you won't find many (or any?) laptops/phones from less popular brands that are designed in sustainability in mind since they'll never become top sellers. It's hard to blame business for such actions if the profit is their only goal, but trying at the same time to advertise themselves as the initiative that actively works on making a positive change just feels fake and cheap. It kind of feels that making money on reducing negative impact of harmful industry is more lucrative than looking for a real change - even when it's within company's reach. - Some refurbed's advertisements feel like consumption is generally awesome as long as you buy refurbished devices. Consumption is consumption. Period. No matter how many refurbished devices you're gonna buy, world won't become greener because of that, quite the opposite. - Popular company's slogan about comparing refurbished devices vs new ones in terms of saving CO2 feels like comparing apples to oranges, since you don't consider where the refurbished devices come from and if it they have been already replaced by new devices at the origin and if that was even necessary. There's also no guarantee that buying refurbished device will result in one less new device being produced. - Emphasizing that buying via their website is safer, can build fear of buying directly from actual refurbishers - which in many cases offer very similar warranty and since they're the ones doing the heavy lifting it's important to support them. That's not a big issue, yet if you check opinions about refurbed, you'll realize that nothing is perfect. - Another highly used marketing strategy is advertising their offers as "up to 40% cheaper" - This is more of a nitpicking, but this cheap marketing strategy makes you feel that you're not only helping the environment, but also save significant amount of money. I suggest you check yourself how it looks in reality by comparing items you would potentially buy (in reasonable condition). Yes, this is not the only company that use this technically true statement to increase conversion, yet, typical e-commerce doesn't pretend they're also working towards greener future. CORPORATE STANDARDS - Avoiding answering the questions and not giving reasons behind questionable company's actions - Sugarcoating and hiding problems under the rug, up to a point of misleading people during townhalls - you can verify that by checking the old recordings after getting hired. It's really hard to trust such management. - First comes the model then reality has to fits in, even if it doesn't add up - salaries, promotions, evaluations, values etc. - Management style is strongly top-down, bottom-up initiatives are quite rare and usually don't get much attention - unless company can speak about them on social media - "Flexible" company's values - management can dynamically change meaning of any value to fit currently required narration. "Equality" for example can be a great tool for shutting down any idea, without even going into any discussion, "transparency" can be emphasized when we're talking about successes, but easily forgotten while encountering a real problem. - While scaling the company up, management applied many typical corporate tools and standards. While some of them organized the work and processes, others, highly criticized, have been brought along as well. These toxic practices were not acceptable in any companies I've been cooperating with in the past. When you check refurbed founders' professional background such transformation becomes less surprising. - Solving problems by enforcing questionable solutions instead of trying to understand the real cause. - Since management is usually not strongly involved in the low level of the development process, "being visible" feels often more important than doing actual work when it comes to performance evaluation - Aside of promotional cases, salary increases are the lowest I've ever heard of (even considered old (low) inflation). If you continuously monitor the real value of your salary in refurbed, considering inflation, potential changes to exchange rate etc, there is high chance that you'll realize that with each year, you're earning significantly less, despite of good performance. Salary increases are so small, that the difference between multiple performance levels are almost neglectable. - Promoting an opportunistic attitude of the employees - You can draw a hard line between senior management and the rest of the company considering multiple aspects - benefits, transparency, trust etc. - Evaluation methods promote setting the official goals very low, so you can contribute to more visible side initiatives. This leads to situation where "outplaying the system" is more profitable than setting high ambitions and the consequences are already noticeable. - Developing new features is generally quite slow, since some processes feel more important than actual delivery - Fake feedback culture - company speaks a lot about importance of sharing feedback and actively ask for it, but quite often it's silently ignored, without any explanation LACK OF CAREER GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES - Technical career ladder exists on paper, but realistically speaking, as an engineer you'll reach the ceiling pretty fast - Product and software lack of challenges and innovation, so in general work is quite repetitive (yet another e-commerce platform). Business and technology are just another copy of already existing solutions and you might get feeling that there is no vision of building something unique or innovative in the long run. - Performance evaluation metrics and standards are usually defined and clarified right before the actual evaluation, so the whole process is kind of messed up - Some performance metrics are hard to meet by people on lower career levels, while achieving them is essential part of the day to day work of others, so the system is noticeably skewed towards people on specific positions. - Senior management in the engineering department have a lot of technical experience. That allows them to generalize problems, pick battle tested solutions and usually make the right decisions, but since they're not up to date with the cutting edge technologies, that is also a noticeable trap. Occasionally, great experience creates tunnel vision and overgeneralizing problems, that leads to missing the important nuances of modern technologies, so sometimes it feels like company is reinventing the wheel, wasting already rare potential for true innovation. - Knowledge sharing culture is very basic, so it's hard to learn about new technologies from work context. To be fair, there are people actively working on improving this, but there is a long way to go. SUMMARY To sum it up, refurbed is yet another e-commerce platform that tries to make you feel better about consumption. Few years ago their values and mission felt honest and you could get the impression, that they're trying to actually change something for better. Times changed, new investment rounds came in and now it feels like the greed to get more profit have swallowed all the things that were meaningful in the past. Aside of all problems mentioned above this was the only company in my entire career, where some recent management's business decisions felt immoral and made me feel ashamed of being part of the brand. If you really care about meaning of your work, I would suggest to carefully consider if you really want to join refurbed. On the other hand, if all you want from job is money, your moral spine have a bit of flexibility, you accept corporate standards and hypocrisy, then you should be fine.