bol Reviews

I started my career at bol.com in June 2018 and had a traumatic year. I landed to a complete Dutch team, so they all had to switch their communication to English for an international junior. Team members explicitly stated their unwillingness to communicate in English as a great welcome. Team members were very reluctant to cooperate/communicate with me and manager wasn’t very helpful. I started to hear negative feedbacks about me from my manager(I would prefer to receive feedbacks from teammates first) and indeed tried to reflect on feedbacks even if I wasn’t agree. How much ever I worked to be a better engineer, teammates picked up negative situations with a needle and came up with bad feedbacks. For example, I tried to attend to an important meeting with software architects about our team to observe and learn, but I received “losing focus and trying to participate other projects” feedback. My contract was for one year and I wasn’t a citizen of an EU country. I was aware that I had to go back to my country if bol would not extend my contract. At the same time understood that I had no chance in that bullying team and wanted to switch to another team. This request had been blocked by manager by saying “let’s open a new page in new year”. A new manager came and I had good 2 - 3 months. She told me everything is going good and for sure I’d receive an extension; maybe even a permanent contract. At the same time I realized picking up negative situations with a needle feedbacks started again. We had an incident on a software I mostly built (and peer reviewed). All the team except me had meetings about incident and “new way of working” titled meetings. I was explicitly not invited and discriminated in team by not invited to a meeting about team’s way of working. I expressed my dissatisfaction about the situation with my manager and she said “I should focus on my job”. One week after, I was fired out of blue. Moreover, that manager sent a mail about my departure to whole department and stated reason to leave was “low performance”. Thanks god I was able to find another company in a short period of time. It was hard for me to overcome psychological effects I had in bol. I would not advise to anybody such a toxic company like this. Don’t believe to contract extension promises managers give, I’m not the one who left out a small time to find another offer.

Extremely result focused. Lip service when it comes to compliance with law- and regulations. Carrot-and-stick culture. Within IT-department: Successes are claimed by management. Failures are blamed on the employee.