Failed to deliver on 100% of promises. - Backend Developer SENSO2ME Employee Review

- We've been offered jobs at a new company started by Senso2Me with the promise of starting by the end of June or start of July 2021. They seemed like very decent guys (and many were actually great people). After a series of delays and mails saying "Sorry for the delay, hang on in there, we'll make it up to you" and calls pushing back the hiring date by a little bit on a bi-weekly basis, we were told that we'd get a big bonus as a sign-up bonus, to cover our losses of not taking on another job while waiting for the 4,5 months it took them to eventually hire us. I was told that for me personally - who was the only new employee that rented a flat in Athens (for 550 euro/month which I had to borrow to pay while waiting) they would cover the rent I paid as well. When we signed, on the 17th of November, we were paid the rest of the month as a bonus - yes, we waited for 4,5 months getting ourselves in debt to get a 800 euro compensation. - Salaries were never on time. - We were told that we'd be given Christmas gifts (a tablet or a pair of headphones). They never came. I don't expect a company to give everyone Christmas gifts, but don't promise them when you don't plan to give them. - We were promised private insurance which we did not get. - We were promised a 2% of the salary bonus as a deposit at a retirement plan. We didn't get it. - Our offices in Greece had no equipment. It was a rented flat that had some chairs and desks already, so we used what half-broken chairs there were. It took 6-6,5 months for a coffee machine and external monitors, keyboards and mice to arrive (that's 6+ from officially beginning work, 11 from when we were supposed to). - We were promised new, good quality laptops to work on and even asked what kind we prefer only to be given some really old second-hand ones(with decent characteristics). At some point my boss was checking something from my laptop and he was like "You can't scroll from the touchpad or tap to click? lol" - yeah, right. - We were asked to work from the office a lot (eventually settled into a 3-2 hybrid style) when we had no office equipment and the only thing that the office provided was noise and the need to spend money to order take-away. - The code base is probably the best example of technical debt I can think of. This is not because the developers aren't good - on the contrary, the only 2 devs the company has are great - but because the old devs quit together and it was left to the analysts to write production code for what I believe was a year or so. There are parts of the code base that are really well-written, especially the ones where the experienced devs work on, but there's a ton of scary code in there. If you expect to learn from well-documented code, you will not. - On the first time that I was late on delivering on some tasks - that frankly were a lot of work for a single dev that wasn't even familiar with the code base - I was told that my deliverables were not on time and if that goes on I'd be fired. Talking about deliverables, read the points above. - On my last meeting I was to implement a solution for a problem that I've been discussing with one of the senior devs. At the point of the meeting, I had implemented a solution that was different from the one suggested by the senior because I found that one hard to implement in the current code-base. We were still looking for a better solution, since both the ones we had were not really optimal, and at that point I wasn't convinced that the one suggested to me was that much better either. The CEO told me to shut up, learn my place and do what I'm told by the seniors instead of question the technical matters. In the next meeting I had with said dev (who's been an amazing tutor to me) we agreed on a third, better solution that we both liked. But as I started working on it, I was notified that I'd been fired because it would cost the company less than to keep me till the end of the month. -Eventually, when I handed in my notice I was told to pack my stuff and let go the same day, because in Greece, during the first year of your employment the employer can fire you without notice and without any compensation so, since it was cheaper to fire me than pay me my notice period they did. Honestly, I feel kinda cheated working here. And while the environment was generally good, the company failed to deliver on 100% of their promises. When only a few things are wrong but an effort is seen to deliver, you can call that a mistake, but when this is the rule that has no exceptions then something must be wrong with the company itself.