Pros
- The problems that the company is trying to solve are very complex and interesting to work on. - The people on the floor are very talented and very pleasant to work with. - You get a lot of ownership and autonomy (most of the time).
Cons
I joined OakNorth after having a very motivating and inspiring conversation with one of the co-founders a year or so ago. He gave me a lengthy speech about how he did not want to live in a world where everything was owned by mega-corporations, with no room for smaller businesses and no support for local communities. The passion was real and it was something I, and many others, could get behind. The solution was clear; build software to help banks make smaller decisions in higher volumes to support smaller businesses, who are the backbone of the economy. All while making the segment profitable for big banks to serve. Fast forward to today, all I have to say is - Where is this passion? Internally we never talk about the lenders, the smaller businesses we are trying to support. We never talk about the impact the loans our clients approve have on communities and the economy. All we focus on is landing clients. This is not a mission, this is not motivating. And no, changing our mission statement to "Democratising Lending Globally" does not mean you have solved this problem. This mission has to permeate its way through every aspect of the organisation. The new KPIs do nothing to focus on this mission, they only focus on customer satisfaction and sales. The cause of this company's ongoing demise is two-fold; management and culture. *Management* The founders of the business come from a background in finance. They are successful business men, having sold businesses in the past and built a well performing bank in the UK (OakNorth Bank). However, they are not experienced in building software companies. This is something they are aware of and have tried to solve for, but something that unfortunately still haunts the business to this day. Their solution was obvious - hire people who do have this experience. Unlucky for them, they chose to place their trust in the wrong group of people. Middle management at OakNorth Platform is an absolute sham. I have never, in my life, seen such an incompetent "leadership team" in my entire career. I don't know if this comes down to incompetence on an individual level, or if it's a lack of trust and/or communication with upper management. But what I do know is that every decision they make is worse than the last. It also doesn't help that nobody in management seems to be around for more than a year or so. I didn't particularly want to talk about individuals, because on a personal level everyone in the company is lovely and I have enjoyed my time working with them. But I cannot write this review without mentioning something about the two CEOs (platform and bank) and the CTO (platform). You could ask anyone in the organisation what the platform CEO actually does and they would not have an answer for you. This extends to other members of the leadership team, not just people on the floor. He was supposedly brought in to improve the culture. Given that he has a background in HR at Google, I (and clearly the founders) thought that this would be something he could evolve. In reality, somehow he has managed to do the opposite, which I will touch on later. The CTO is a nice chap, but from what I can tell, he just doesn't have the necessary experience for his current role within the organisation. Engineers seem to scoff at his lack of technical ability on the regular, which obviously only results in his own team having a lack of respect for him. It has also resulted in the departure of a number of very talented engineers. He also unfortunately seems to massively undervalue product and design. Although this is not solely his doing, this has at least contributed to our now incoherent, directionless product that solves many problems badly. The design team particularly has been chronically understaffed from day one and it shows. *Culture* What do you get when you cross a commodity bank with a tech startup? A very strange, self-contradicting child is the answer. "We've got a pool table in the office - but you're only allowed to use it after hours", "We've got a social guild for people to organise social events with the team - but any meetings regarding this have to be conducted outside of working hours", "We've got flexible working arrangements - but never work from home and you must be online from 9-5", "We have games nights and socials in the office after hours - but nobody is allowed alcohol and you have to bring your own games", "We pay you all above market rate - but we can't afford to buy you stationary" … you get the idea. Ultimately these cultural problems come from the top. As I mentioned before, the founders both come from finance where this may be the norm. But it's 2020 and in tech this just does not cut it anymore when you're competing with the likes of Google and Facebook for talent. The other contributing factor to the cultural problems is pay. Almost everyone at OakNorth is chronically overpaid. I am continually amazed when I hear about the absurd salaries of some people in the organisation. If you're reading this as a prospective candidate you may see this as a positive, but what you have to realise is that compensation to performance is a bell curve, and OakNorth firmly falls on the far right of this curve. This results in a world where everyone is at the company for the wrong reasons. Nobody cares about the mission and the problems we're trying to solve. Everyone becomes political, ass-covering yes men who just want to defend their pay cheque while doing as little work as possible. Many people I have spoken to want to leave the company but simply cannot because they can't find a competing salary elsewhere. Finally I wanted to touch on something that happened about a year ago during the UK general election. The CEO gave a speech during the company all-hands where he labelled the Labour Party as communist and said, I quote, "I don't want to wake up to a communist government led by Jeremy Corbyn". I think this was probably one of the most inappropriate things I've heard during a meeting like this in my career, it is not the time nor the place to project your own political opinions on your employees, especially when you are the multi-millionaire CEO. I and many others raised this with HR at the time, but like most things, it was never addressed. HR is a complete black box.
