Joining a US-based startup in India seemed like a no-brainer - dollar salaries, HQ in America, founding engineer - you name it, it all sounded so cool. But let me tell you, it turned out to be more like a glorified call center with average tech. The pay wasn't amazing, and the whole year was super stressful.
They were like "Doors are open, you can leave whenever you want" or "We have a zero-day notice period policy" but guess what? Leaving the company was a complete nightmare, there was no process, no HR to streamline things, absolutely nothing! Getting the paperwork I needed to move on was a hassle and the long notice period with a notice-pay felt like getting kicked on the way out. Plus, I heard whispers of some ex-employees getting bad references, just what kind of barbarians are they?
Job security? Forget about it. People were getting fired left and right, which made everyone super paranoid. There have been so many instances of people getting demoted to intern for asking questions the CEO didn't like, and then fired! or getting kicked out for wanting to work from home, even though that was part of the deal when they hired him, or getting fired for updating your LinkedIn profile, or getting fired for speaking your mind out, etc.
The leadership was, well, let's just say they weren't trust-builders. Expectations were all over the place. The CEO took all the vacations he wanted but flipped out if someone needed a short leave. Getting info from the CTO was like pulling teeth, and the CEO himself wasn't exactly Mr. Sunshine. He'd yell to keep everyone in line, and he even listened in on conversations! (obviously via mics installed in the workplace). Apparently, salary raises weren't a thing he liked to discuss - lots of yelling every time. The official workday ended at 6, but guess what? 10-hour days were the norm, weekends sometimes too, and forget about getting paid back for that extra time. Broken promises were the company motto. They weren't making money from India Dev Center, so the CEO decided salaries were charity and told us to forget about the performance appraisals we were promised during hiring. Even the basic stuff was lacking. The office was packed - like, 30 people in a space meant for 10! with no cafeteria to even eat comfortably. The coffee situation was questionable (powdered milk, anyone?), and the office staff wasn't exactly helpful. Getting hot water felt like a daily quest. And guess what? No dedicated toilets in the office, so we had to resort to nasty public restrooms. Not exactly a recipe for employee well-being. And, don't get me started on the Engineering Head, that guy is useless, he doesn't even know what's CSS (like really?) and he's the leader (the CEO has appointed) we should be looking to if we end up in a problematic situation like merging wrong branches. Does he even know what git is? After all this, they still forced us to write positive reviews on Glassdoor.
The tech side of things was a mess too. The code was buggy as heck, and pointing fingers was the go-to move. Nobody shared knowledge, and taking risks was a big no-no. People were more worried about saving their skin than actually innovating. Asking the higher-ups for help just got you ridiculed. Code reviews were a joke, and if something went wrong in production, guess who got blamed? The Devs or QA, of course, sometimes even fired.
This past year has been just miserable.
PS: They recently started responding to reviews here. While it's good to see them engaging, don't get influenced by this, they're just trying to boost their rating. This is a facade, why? Just go and check the ratio of "likes" on these reviews. Negative reviews are getting significantly more traction than positive ones. You do the math, they have a really bad habit of putting forced positive reviews.
