The worst professional experience of my life
Pros
• Salary that covers basic living expenses, though not particularly competitive • WFH options available for some roles • Promising product pipeline • Ambitious growth objectives • Opportunity to work alongside professionals with 10, 15, even 20 years of industry experience. If you're eager to learn, there's a lot of knowledge to absorb from those who have truly mastered their craft over time. Some of them are nearing retirement, and having the chance to collaborate with them is a rare privilege. They understand the industry inside and out, and their insights are genuinely valuable.
Cons
Where do I even begin? There are absolutely no internal processes. No coordination between teams. No onboarding structure for employees or partners. No quality control in the services delivered to clients. Everything feels improvised and chaotic. There is no career growth whatsoever. If you are ambitious or hoping to develop, this is not the place. People stay in roles for years and contribute nothing positive to the ecosystem, yet they are untouchable due to tenure. Meanwhile, new or capable employees are overworked and undervalued. The culture is deeply toxic. Favoritism is rampant. There is a strong blame culture where mistakes are thrown around like hot potatoes and accountability is nonexistent. Leadership is unclear, direction is missing, and no one seems to know who is responsible for what. The HR function exists only to protect the company from its people, not the other way around. There is zero trust in HR. Their role is performative at best, manipulative at worst. People are not happy. Clients are not happy. Partners are not happy. That says everything. There is a heavy black cloud over the business. Working here means wearing “different hats” not for flexibility or learning, but to squeeze employees dry with no support. There is no work-life balance, no clarity, and leadership is stuck 20 years in the past. After the merger of two companies, leadership promised stability and claimed no jobs would be lost. That was a lie. One of their first moves was mass layoffs, including people with 10 to 15 years of tenure who were never given a chance to adapt. Even worse, their workload was dumped on those who remained. No plan. No transition. Just chaos and pressure. Honestly, those who were let go were the lucky ones. All senior roles during and after the merger were handed to a closed circle of people already connected to top leadership, especially those close to HQ. It was not about qualifications or contribution. It was about proximity and internal politics. If you are not part of the clique, forget growth. Your work will not be recognized unless you are friends with someone in leadership. Even worse, these roles were often given to people who had no idea what the job required. Critical roles were handed out based on relationships, not merit. People were promoted or reassigned into positions they were not qualified for, simply because they had been around long enough or knew the right people. The result was decisions made with zero competence, projects collapsing, and chaos spreading. This kind of internal favoritism is not just demoralizing. It is destructive. Bonuses and benefits are another nightmare. There is no structured performance review process. No development conversations. No feedback. No clear goals. You will not know if you are doing well until the moment comes when you are not getting a bonus and no one will tell you why. Bonuses are distributed based on favoritism. If you are liked, you will be rewarded, regardless of performance. If not, you are invisible. There is zero transparency in how decisions are made. No scorecards. No explanations. Just silence unless you are one of the favored few. This is not a reward system. It is a popularity contest. And it destroys motivation, fairness, and morale. The service delivered to clients is also a disaster. There is no quality control, no validation, and no accountability for what is being sold. Internally, it is obvious that the systems are broken. The product delivered to customers often does not work as it should. There is not enough global infrastructure to support these services. There are not enough engineers or contractors. Internal teams know the overload is real, but nothing has been done about it for years. Clients wait weeks or even months for basic installations. One or two vehicles might take a month simply because there are no available people to do the job. There is no operational capacity. No urgency to fix anything. The business model does not scale. And everyone inside knows it. This has led to a very high customer churn rate. And under these conditions, that is not surprising. It is inevitable. Now the most ironic part. This company sells AIoT and optimization solutions, yet it operates like it is stuck in the early 2000s. There is no business process optimization internally. Business operations are messy, outdated, and painful. It can take hours to complete a simple task because there is no functioning infrastructure. Every department uses different tools. Nothing is connected. There is no visibility or alignment. There is no centralized CRM. No proper onboarding platform. No system to track client accounts or history. If you are assigned a new customer, you will likely have no clue what was done before. You are forced to dig through old emails and disconnected systems and hope for the best. Internal tools are outdated or broken. Despite being an AI-based company, it lacks basic digital structure or maturity. Sales, onboarding, project delivery, follow-ups – all feel like something from 30 years ago. It is exhausting. And employees and clients are the ones paying for it. Above all, the only thing that matters is how things look to investors. That is the core focus. Not employee wellbeing. Not product quality. Not customer satisfaction. Just metrics, presentations, and appearances. Over-promising and under-delivering has become the culture. This is not a place to grow. It is a place to survive. Until you burn out or walk away.
