A work culture rife with inefficiencies, nepotism and not tackling problems - Product and Tech Employee N26 Employee Review

A lot of the problems at N26 are because of the incompetence of the C-level as leaders of a large organisation. Nepotism is rife, especially in the upper ranks — the most important factor in getting a position is not competence/experience — it's who you know. This is bad for the company — the best people, if they've not played the politics game, do not get to become the decision makers. Instead, the ranks are filled with yes-men (and women) who'll toe the line of senior management on all issues. As other reviews have mentioned, there have been several high-profile departures of the N26 veterans from both the product team and tech teams. When asked about this, the CPO said in an AMA (paraphrasing) "They were not good enough for us". These people, who were instrumental in taking the startup to where it is now, left in large part because they were unhappy with the direction the company is taking. This direction is basically: get VC money with promises of growth, launch an unfinished, unfocused, half-baked product in a new market, be surprised when it doesn't pan out, repeat ad infinitum. Prime example of this: 6 months ago, all the hype was about the UK launch. Now, UK customer numbers/metrics are so far behind the initial projections that now, there is absolutely no mention of the UK market by the C-level. The reason for this: Monzo is so good because of their laser-sharp focus on the UK market. Now the big thing is the US launch. There has been plenty of effort to drum up fake excitement in the ranks about launching a sub-par product in the US. This is bound to be a failure: The competitors have a much more focused, more feature packed products whereas we will soon move on to preparing for launching in Brazil (where Nu bank is dominant already with a great product). When asked about this growth over product mindset, the CPO's response was basically "You're wrong" (she actually said this but just with in more words "I'll challenge your belief that we're neglecting existing markets"). This mindset of ignoring problems is actually a lot broader and there are several other structural issues which stem from this that I'm not covering here. An example: Our internal employee survey has been tanking for a few quarters and there has been no concrete response from the management (other than a lavish offsite for upper management). When you ask questions in AMAs with C-levels, the response is very much like a politician being confronted with a policy failure: They deny that there was a failure, and if there was, it's due to external factors. Mostly though, they claim that everything is rosy and if you think it isn't, then the problem is with you and not the company. Concrete numbers on this: When asked "How likely do you think that this internal company survey will lead to actual change", some teams had an "agree" score of less than 20%. Oh well. There are other problems as well: The hierarchy is rigid with several levels of management, one above the other. While being a tech company, the people in the broader tech organisation have basically no say in the direction of the company and are generally looked upon as second class citizens. This shows: our deployment pipeline breaks often and outages in live, customer facing services are frequent. A lot of developer time is wasted trying to fight the deployment process. Our tech onboarding process is a joke. The CEO still interferes directly with Product teams, not trusting them and not working based off of user-research data. The cofounder keeps chanting the mantra that we need to recruit and retain the best people, but they're paying really poor salaries, especially in tech (some of my colleagues have left the company and ended up with 25% raise). They've only introduced ESOPs now and with really archaic vesting conditions (what about people who've been here for two years already? They've lost out on the highest growth phase). The office is poorly connected and the move was planned so badly that less than a year after moving, there's no space left. Meeting rooms are perennially booked so people end up having meetings in the kitchen, terrace etc. The promotion cycle is rigid and requires two weeks worth of work to produce the 'promotion-packet'. And on and on and on. The laundry list of problems is huge but the bigger problem is that management is unwilling to tackle these problems.