Supportive Teams and a Meaningful Journey - Senior Full-Stack Engineer GivEnergy Employee Review

Colleagues that are not executive level are great colleagues. Particularly, huge kudos to Senior Software Engineering Manager HL for setting proper coding standards, yet giving opportunities to colleagues under him to perform leadership roles and trying to protect colleagues under him from management hell.

The COO JL is the worst. Micromanages every individual he can, down to demanding reasons for being even just one minute late to office. At meetings, insists that everything be done his way, even as he has absolutely no idea how it is like to run a software team. The style of management is more akin to managing factory style workers in China where everyone is expected to turn up on time and be worked to the bone. Its a mess even at managerial level. Even in such a short duration, many good software heads quit as the COO argues with them all. Meetings turn into a warzone of words and blame culture. Company direction keeps changing multiple times. Projects are started and halted at very short notices. Projects get thrown around to different teams at short notices. Employees are hired and fired very frequently. No proper process. It is as if QA is redundant, as new features implemented by developers can be pushed straight to production even without going through QA. Even going through QA, quality is a mess and simple features can simply not work at all, resulting in multiple rejections from QA.

Interesting work in a company which has a goal that would be beneficial to the world. A workforce with a professional ethic and really wanting to do a good job. Friendly coworkers. Partial remote working.

Sadly, despite so much that might appear from the outside to be great... Toxic management culture, actual bullying witnessed in various forms, job insecurity, poor physical working conditions, continual firefighting to try to stop complaining customers and installers from sullying the company's (earlier good) reputation. Huge fraction of staff was hurriedly let go shortly before Christmas in a cost-cutting measure despite busy and extensive hiring just months before, suggesting either incompetence or worse on the finance side.