Inept, toxic leadership - Anonymous employee Fjorge Employee Review

To prospective developers: It's very telling that every 1-star or 2-star review for Fjorge has at least 12-15 upvotes, whereas the 5-star reviews have only 1-2 upvotes. Plain and simple: it is not a good place to work, and the developers who pass through here know it. This company is currently experiencing a mass exodus of developers. Long-time developers who have been here for 3+ years, as well as recent hires who have only been on the team for 3+ months, are all jumping ship. This is happening because we are all realizing how grossly mismanaged and undervalued developers at Fjorge truly are. I implore all prospective employees to do everything in your power to explore other opportunities, for your own sake, as well as the sake of the industry; it's our collective responsibility as technology specialists to expose manipulative and predatory management tactics that companies like Fjorge have a colorful history of practicing. I understand that life circumstances can often dictate your employment options; if it's between working for Fjorge or going without food, I obviously can't hold it against you. The only other time when you might consider working for Fjorge is if you're fresh in the industry and need to get a year or two of experience under your belt. Just know that if you work at Fjorge, you will be severely overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, and viewed as a disposable cog in the leadership team's profitability burnout machine. Some fun features of working at Fjorge include common retaliatory behavior from mid-level leadership members who will directly oversee you in both the projects department and the maintenance department. If they don't like you, they will uninvite you from meetings or prevent you from receiving promotions or raises. This is especially easy for them because there are quite literally zero quantitative or qualitative metrics upon which developers are evaluated for their performance or skill; your career progression will be based solely on the time you spend at the company with blind loyalty and obedience. You better hope you have your quarterly review on a good day for your supervisor, because that's what is going to be the most impactful factor on your career progression while you're at Fjorge. To top it all off, regardless of which department you're in, your quarterly reviews will be with someone who has literally no technical background, and an ego more fragile than a Pringle chip. The developer manager(s) are manipulative, dismissive, and not receptive of criticism; it’s insulting to have our company even entertain the notion that a single non-technical person has the capacity or ability to properly advocate for and oversee so many developers. When you set aside the whole lose-lose situation (your employment with Fjorge), you'll get an exciting glimpse into the inner-workings of the company from a business side. More specifically, you'll get tuned into how Fjorge encourages developers to nickel-and-dime any client at any opportunity they get to increase their billable hours. For example, if an employee is leaving the company because they've realized that Fjorge is a toxic place to work, you will be expected to bill your hours spent on internal knowledge transfer directly to the client (whose project you're leaving) instead of swallowing the cost themselves, even though it's not the clients fault that Fjorge wasn't able to maintain employee satisfaction. The company takes a terrifyingly comically naïve approach to security. Without going too far into it (and adding to the already sizable risk that the company has placed on itself out of sheer ignorance) there is an alarmingly non-negligible chance that someone with rudimentary experience and motive could breach their system and force the company to shut down, which would render everyone jobless. This exact concern has been clearly shared with leadership time and time again, and they maintain the sentiment of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." and continue to play the numbers game, banking on nothing bad ever happening. It's clear that they don't value the livelihood of their employees in a way that I would expect from an employer. Whenever you are dealing with supervisors or members of leadership, make sure you are taking screenshots of your Slack messages and recording video calls. These will save you. The developer supervisors are notoriously skilled at miscommunicating and gaslighting developers when it suits them. This is something that nobody should ever have to consider doing, but I can't count the number of times that I've saved myself by screenshotting, Cc'ing, or Bcc'ing emails and messages internally. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you absolutely have the most insight and knowledge into solving a technical issue for the company, you will still unfortunately have next to no chance of being able to compete with the opinionated and power hungry members of leadership to bring about actual impactful improvements and change. Even the senior-most developers are kept on a short leash and prevented from being involved in the company’s decision-making processes in any meaningful way; developers who are undoubtedly far more capable than other members of leadership will get the privilege of watching oblivious, non-technical coworkers get arbitrarily promoted into roles at the company in which they will inevitably flounder for years until you finally decide it's time to freshen up your resume and progress your career elsewhere. The good news is that if you have even just a couple years of experience, and a little patience, you can easily go elsewhere and make 30-40% more than what Fjorge would ever consider paying you. The word for Fjorge's culture is toxic. A large majority of the people at Fjorge are genuine, but the culture that everyone supposedly buys into is seriously so fake. If employees were truly the priority, they wouldn’t be criminally underpaid. People wouldn’t be forced into burning through the entirety of their PTO balance because they got COVID. People wouldn’t be able to make +40% more with a simple job hop. It’s atrocious that leadership celebrates the idea of pacifying the employees on a month-to-month basis with bogus rewards like a $40 yard game. If there’s extra money, they should give end-of-year bonuses like a respectable company. They need to stop masking censored, blind compliance as "Chipotle" (Fjorge's contrived analogy of being a team player. Like how different ingredients in a burrito play well together. Yeah. I know.) Obediencehis is not what it means to be a good team player. A company should celebrate people who voice their opinions and aren’t terrified of sharing their dissent with moronic decisions that leadership forces on the company, whose side effects often affect developers the most. I can’t think of strong enough adjectives to describe the magnitude of problems that need to get addressed from both a technical and organizational standpoint before the company is going to be even remotely capable of realistically and responsibly scaling to the size that leadership has its sights set on. The company is a burnout factory where employees only last 2-3 years. They have let some of the most brilliant developers I will probably ever work with walk right out the door without even realizing it because there is no process of evaluating performance in a meaningful way. We celebrate people putting out fires at midnight with "shout outs" in a Slack channel and attributing their efforts to having good "Chiptole," and let them have a chance at a $15 pizza coupon every month - we shouldn’t be celebrating recipes for complete and utter burnout! Celebrate the people who don’t need to put out midnight fires on projects because they had the ability and foresight to eliminate potential future problems! The only reason I'm taking the time to write out this unfiltered and universally shared Fjorge sentiment is because I care deeply about the developers at the company, as well as developers out there early in their career - I want better for them. For the sake of the industry as a whole I won’t settle for not holding companies accountable and effectively communicating this. I'm not excited to leave this review, especially since members of Fjorge in leadership roles have previously reached out to former employees that they suspect of leaving unfavorable reviews - another example of extremely unprofessional behavior - so it's likely a matter of time until the detectives at Fjorge send a message to my inbox. But hopefully my minor inconvenience of sharing my experience while at the company will save at least one person a massive inconvenience of getting employed at the company.