Pros
-Nice WeWork office space in central London (pre pandemic) -Great team spirit in London -Decent salary -Read reviews with care, many of the 4 and 5 star reviews are fake
Cons
-Let me take you through a typical quarter at Soroco. It starts out with ignoring all results and trends from previous periods leading to the setting of completely unrealistic goals - and I really mean insanely unrealistic - by senior management. This goes across almost all parts of the company from sales quotas to product development milestones. Next up is getting people down the hierarchy lines to agree to these goals which is mostly done by applying pressure (there really is no culture of compromise). After a couple of weeks, it then becomes evident that goals are unreachable, putting senior leadership into panic mode. This is when the pressuring gets accompanied by blaming and bullying. I’ve seen people getting told off and shouted at in front of an entire meeting audience for not reaching goals that they were forced to agree to in the first place. Here, the terrible culture established by senior management is at full display, Sales will blame the Product, the Product team will blame Customer Success and so on. The last stage of this cycle of misery is people quitting or getting fired. In the time I was there, about half the people would leave or get fired within a year or so of joining. And then the whole thing starts over again. (According to LinkedIn, median tenure is 1.4 years, meaning half of the people don’t even make it half way through their second year which is in line with my observations) There are a couple of other alarming facts worth highlighting -The product doesn’t work. This is usually blamed on the customer or the customer success team. Deceiving customers is also common to disguise shortcomings. The product is years away from being able to do what is claimed it can do. New features are constantly developed under relentless pressure by overworked and underpaid engineers leading to quality issues. These features are never based on any research or market validation but solely on what the founder deems to be right. Core problems are ignored or swept under the rug (Theranos anyone?) -Diversity is non existing. There are virtually no women at this company. Senior leadership consists entirely of middle aged Indian men, mostly old friends of the new CEO or the founder. Most of them come with an old school 90s IT service background entirely unsuited for a startup. If you’re looking for an American tech start up, look elsewhere -If there is a choice between the company or the employees, the company will always be put first (e.g. cheap expense policy, no perks, reluctance to pay out bonuses, no wfh support, weekend work, regular calls at 6pm on a Friday) -I’ve listed many issues and I could have continued this list endlessly but I want to conclude with what I believe to be the root cause and that is the leadership team which looks strong on paper but is entirely unsuited to lead a company. The arrogance, feeling of entitlement and lack of self-awareness on display are unbelievable and unbearable. The culture is horrendous, hostile and intransparent, employees are being lied to or kept in the dark (e.g. a promise was made that no one would get fired due to Covid only to flet go people 2 months later blaming their performance. To make matters worse, leadership tried to hide this. Some people only found out about their colleagues being fired when they stopped getting responses from them on the internal chat system)
