PENNEO Reviews

The environment in engineering, a branch of the Product and Technology department, is very visibly turning for the worse right now and I believe its leadership is to blame for this. I'll share three very recent examples involving me and that in my opinion perfectly showcases the problems I've been feeling and that eventually lead me to look elsewhere and leave the company. The main problem in my opinion is that the engineering leadership seems to have no idea how to receive feedback and how to communicate with their employees. 1) The CTO of Penneo has made questionable decisions in the past. Namely the last round of re-structuring seems to show some favoritism. But since I am not at a level where I can be aware of every factors, I won't try to review all of these decisions that I found questionable. However, telling your employees to quit in meetings is both absurd and insulting. During a meeting in which he showed internal and anonymous reviews made by employees, when talking about a few pretty negative reviews, he ended up saying "You better be looking for a new job if that's your opinion". I think absolutely everyone on Earth can understand that this isn't a way to start a conversation about the criticism that was made. It most certainly doesn't gives the impression that the criticism is being heard or taken into consideration. And the worse thing about that event is that when a month later the same exercise of presenting internal reviews was performed, after justifying himself for his comment during the last meeting (instead of apologizing for it), the CTO ended up saying "We probably don't want them to be here" when talking about the employees hoping for a salary following the market and its inflation. A great response again, I'm sure everyone was happy to hear that if they are looking for a fair salary they should just go somewhere else. These two meetings were awful and made the engineering department feel toxic because obviously everyone kept talking about it. This is not a way to treat your employees and definitely not a way to keep them around. 2) Another review of the company was recently published on Glassdoor and that other review also contains some criticism on what is happening in the engineering department. And apparently, it is written in a style that matches the way I write and express myself. Because of this, behind closed doors for me, I was therefore identified as the author of this other review. I didn't get antagonized, harassed or nothing of the likes because of this review and I have no idea if my last days were impacted by this. I actually only learned about this other Glassdor review on my very last day at Penneo. But the fact that the engineering leadership saw this review and thought that I wrote it was enough to reinforce this feeling that feedback is ignored. Saying "He left us a bad review" in a corridor is not constructive while the review that I am mentioning is perfectly structured, well written, only contains true facts and is therefore something that should be reflected upon. Considering how well written it is, I guess I should fell honored that I was told that it could have been me. But it wasn't me. And the fact that the leadership decided that I must have been the author only reveals toxicity. Once more, It most certainly doesn't give the impression that the criticism that was provided to them was heard since choosing to leave the company was enough to turn me into the antagonist that wrote a bad review of the company on Glassdoor. 3) I made two exit interviews before leaving the company. One was organized by the People and Culture Department (HR) and the other one was organized by the engineering leadership. During this second interview, I actually shared this problem about receiving feedback that seems to exist. And to highlight the problem, I shared a very specific example during which we were in conflict. During this meeting, we then spent 45 minutes talking about this specific interaction. We didn't talk about the way it was handled and how it played out though. We talked about it because my interviewer was trying to convince me again that his point of view was correct and mine wasn't. During this exit interview, so during a meeting where the interviewer is supposed to mostly listen and hear what I liked or on the contrary had problems with at Penneo, I was told that I was wrong... I can also mention that I was told that becoming a manager could change some of my views. Which is an incredibly bad take in my opinion because I don't see how not being a manager makes me inadequate to have opinions on my management... And so again, we are back at the same point. Criticism and feedback feels completely ignored by the engineering leadership.