Pros
Free lunch, talented colleagues, nice office
Cons
I've written a very positive review here before, but sadly things have changed a lot. And when I say "sadly", I really mean it - it's felt like like a real loss, of a job I was passionate about and a company I believed in. A series of departures from leadership have had a big impact on the culture and ways of working at Accurx, and it's become very clear that one person in leadership has pretty much removed any trace of autonomy from anyone in the organisation. All decisions pretty much go through him now, and others in leadership and beyond are burnt out from trying to challenge this. His lack of experience and unwillingness to listen to anyone else are tearing Accurx apart, and it's such a waste. This company could really achieve great things with more humble, reflective and self-aware leadership - rather than a CEO who chooses to write LinkedIn-thought-leader-esque blogs to us all that completely contradict his actual behaviour. There's still a few nice things about working here: most of the people are lovely, talented and enthusiastic, although that enthusiasm is dwindling as it becomes clearer how little direction we have as a company, and the stressful environment makes it difficult to enjoy working together at times. It's becoming less collaborative and more micromanaged, more pressure to just deliver without asking questions. There's been a continual lack of thought into how to retain trust between team members as the company grows, while also constantly pushing people to give each other "feedback" - this has resulted in some nasty cases of personal attacks disguised as constructive criticism, with no coaching or repercussions. The free lunches are nice. But the social and community elements of the company are gone - previously, for a few months of the year we had the last Friday afternoon of the month free to organise activities together. But when they stopped being as popular (because of the pressure people were under), they were scrapped under the guise of "lack of demand" - a short-sighted decision without any questioning as to why people might not feel like spending time with their colleagues. And now the remaining benefits are "under review" with an absurd survey that asked us all to pick our 5 favourite "benefits" that included options such as "enhanced sick pay", weighed up against the free lunches in a way that probably caused our kitchen team to wonder if their jobs were at risk. The shift to a new company strategy has been total chaos - months of limbo when teams had no idea what direction to go in, and then the answer finally arrived: pretty much every direction at once. Because everyone knows the way to move fast is to completely remove any semblance of focus, right? Comms about the new strategy were abysmal, going from a big flashy ego-driven announcement before anything was actually worked out, followed by week after week of total lack of info, because nobody amongst leadership could find consensus on any details. Now we've got just about enough detail for teams to start working, and they're being pushed for progress but still held up by having to wait for decisions from leadership. Throughout all this it was claimed that this was taking "too long" and that we should be moving faster (like in the good old days, with a much smaller user-base, less clinical risk and less oversight from NHSE...) The new company structure is gambling on "the company vision" over maintaining and improving any of our revenue-generating products - and this is a vision that many users have raised red flags about for years. The chaotic comms extended to redundancies as well, with the company claiming "no planned redundancies" when announcing the new strategy, before declaring that there were redundancies amongst the talent team... which were apparently planned all along. You'd think such a basic comms issue wouldn't be too difficult to figure out, but apparently so. Oh, and this is without mentioning the ongoing long-standing DEIB and discrimination issues that are continually swept under the carpet. There have been cursory nods towards addressing these but without any real buy-in from leadership, presumably because they're constantly busy arguing about everything else. There's probably about to be a wave of people leaving, so if you're interested in working for a company that once did product work pretty well but is now another carbon copy B2B SaaS feature factory, with inexperienced leaders who trust their own opinions over anyone else's, keep an eye on the careers page.
