HelloSelf Reviews

For context, I entered the firm as a data analyst on the back of a data issue that resulted in a financial hit large enough for my job to be posted on a job board. I resolved this issue in week 1 but quickly realised it was a symptom of a terminal disease within the company. The underlying model upon which everything was built, the data, the products, everything was wrong. As such, everything was either broken or breaking. Having specialised in data before I even started my career in data, I recognised the dangers of this and pivoted into a largely data engineering role to remodel and transform the business model and data to enable data analytics to be performed. 1 working day after delivering a company presentation on the issues I'd found, fixed, and the next steps, I was made redundant, as the company was moving away from "high data need channels after careful consideration." The cons: - Emphasis on producing the minimum viable product (a common business strategy). However, at HelloSelf, the definition of viable was lost in translation. If I were to Google the consequences of an issue that I was attempting to resolve, I would see an article as the first result, where in all instances, 80 - 100% and sometimes more of the problems/consequences in the article were present in the company. The result: a Maximum Unusable Product. - Following on from this, the Systems and Data in place prevent success. The largest team in the company since its inception is the tech team, and performing your job in that team is the most miserable experience imaginable. Counting to ten would take an hour if you had to use HelloSelf systems. To explain in more detail, a change to a data table or system or product requires 6 steps. Between each step, you worked with different data and could not see the outcome before you pushed the change live. On top of this, pushing the change live typically took 1-2 days and broke something in the process. This exhausting and untenable process incentivised allowing necessary changes to pile up before it was worth dealing with. A bad foundation that required excessive maintenance and a bad system that prevented basic maintenance --> a perfect storm. - Following on from that, we have a culture of creating, sharing, and acting on misinformation. The data governance, data capture, data analysis, and data engineering were all terrible. Data was randomly inaccurate and to a random scale. This resulted in daily usage and acting on data that many, if not all, stakeholders knew was wrong. Never in my life have I seen such awful data practices in place, and as a result, the decisions and behaviours of those accustomed to operating in this environment were equally random and unhinged. This ultimately is the root cause of many people's frustration and worsening mental health I think, as without the visibility of why these decisions were being made like I had, I can only imagine opening up their work laptop felt like getting into a car they knew would crash but not when. - Toxic Positivity: The real shame starts here, everything above are problems that can be fixed. The environment where you cannot speak up, and if you do speak up, you are viewed as the problem is what has created all the cons and bad sentiment from current employees and colleagues who have left or been made redundant. The company ignores negative feedback, constructive criticism, assumes bad business performance is always temporary, and does not consider negative outcomes of projects during planning. The result is that people silently follow along with detrimental plans, quietly quit, and leave or be made redundant - Poor leadership: Despite landing big relationships in the public and private sector, everything rapidly churns to zero simply due to performance and minimal added benefit, if any, to partners. The tireless work of colleagues like myself, taking on roles and projects far from their job and working excessive hours (mostly battling against poor systems) is wasted. This could be a result of incompetence, repeated and aggressive course corrections, or many other things, it's hard to tell The bitter irony is the deterioration of your mental health by working to support the improvement of others

Just to name a few there is no carrer progression, perpetual instability, frequent change, utter lack of support, lack of understanding of client needs from the top, unreasonable requests, and despite remote working, there is still very poor work life balance. I am leaving this honest review as I feel a moral duty to share my experiences and warn colleagues about what I perceived to be a psychologically unsafe environment. I am one of many experienced clinicians who I believe found HelloSelf an abhorrent place to work. Many clinicians left the company possibly due to similar concerns, also aluded to by other reviews here. Some people decided to cut their losses and move on after months of extreme stress, others were seemingly encouraged to leave in unhelpful ways. When you first join this company, everyone seems friendly and welcoming. It almost seems too good to be true. In my experience this was because it was. The company presents itself as welcoming of challenge and different ideas. In reality, this was not my experience at all, and at the slightest indication you might disagree or question their actions, or, god forbid, their ethics, or what you might perceive as lack of, you might be swiftly cut off entirely. It is possible that this seemingly toxic and ethically diverse culture that in my opinion was the norm, has now improved. However, while those at the wheel remain the same, that is very unlikely. I am referring to what many might consider as a money chasing CEO, surrounded by family and friends, carefully selected to perpetuate a cacophony of sycophants in golden shackles. For sure, a stream of happy positive reviews will be commissioned to attempt to tarnish the legitimacy of these claims (look at previous attempts...). You will be the judge of that!