Recensioni N26

Vantaggi

- Super cool colleagues - Young and dynamic people - Very good quality of product and code - Time to learn - Benefits are nice

Svantaggi

- MVP is MVP, not a final product. After we release a MVP we need quite some time to make it perfect before moving to the next product. - Office is not in a great location, but it's ok, not that bad - no AC (would be nice for summer heat waves)

Vantaggi

- As a hypergrowth, there are obviously growing pains and challenges but I like how management is listening to employees and making every effort to improve things. - company is very diverse - challenging environment - fast paced - great people - dynamic with lots of fun work - interesting problems to solve

Svantaggi

We need more diversity in the executive team, right now it's almost all Austrian or ex St. Gallen men. Not sure how this will breed or welcome different ideas for growing the culture of the business.

Consigli per i dirigenti

Keep listening to your employees and put into action what you have promised... basically continue what you're doing :) Can we also push for more diversity in the executive team? Gender, nationalities... universities....

Vantaggi

the criticality of success in the US means theres obviously a very high bar in a really fast environment so working with smart people who like to laugh brings a lot of fun to the challenges and is quickly growing my skill set

Svantaggi

Constantly changing environment means you have to pick up new things quickly but that’s my preference anyway as I’m becoming more marketable

Vantaggi

Flat Hirarchies, Good working atmosphere, easy to take responsibility, Benefits like free drinks and food

Svantaggi

Payment of your work and decision culture sometimes questionable

Vantaggi

The purpose of the company is engaging. There is a lot of space to grow. We are open to use and try the new hot technologies. People are nice.

Svantaggi

Hyper-growth sometimes overload the people that are already here and the on-boarding is not that structured (in a team level), because there is a lot of people coming in at the same time. There is not much diversity - neither black people, woman, LGBT... There are too many senior people - can be a con in discussions where people are passionate and not that flexible with other opinions. The carrear path is not... well structured.

Vantaggi

The usual startup perks: Free food on wednesday, subsidized BVG card and Urban Sports memnership. Office dogs (hi Benno). Some really good people but this is getting rarer and rarer.

Svantaggi

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.

Consigli per i dirigenti

My advice: If you turn your eyes away from the problems, that doesn't mean that the problems go away. Don't insult your employees by lying to them: People know that you're not paying them 70th percentile wages, people know about the nepotism, people know of poor adoption in newer markets, people know about all the problems mentioned above. Don't whitewash the problems: they exist and the first step to tackling these... issues is to acknowledge them.

Vantaggi

Full of hard working young talented people, lack of hierarchy, opportunity for learning/exposure across the business and of course, the chance to disrupt an antiquated industry!

Svantaggi

Founder leadership and culture is lacking, growing pains are resulting in inefficiencies and redundancies across the business

Vantaggi

Great young atmosphere that it´s revolutionising Banking

Svantaggi

As all fast growing companies it can be chaotic sometimes