Vantaggi
Overall I enjoyed my time at Hellofresh Australia. The biggest pros as I saw them were: - Company largely filled with young people with good personalities enabled by a relatively hands-off management - Although changes were occurring by the time I left (see 'Cons' below) there's no doubt that compared to companies of similar sizes, HelloFresh was more free-spirited and less stodgy than it could have been (casual clothes in office, relatively flat hierarchies, etc.) - Work life balance was honestly great, it wasn't hard to be finished well before 4 pm each day (this depends very heavily on the team). - Really cool team and company events that happened fairly frequently. - 70% discount on HF discounts was an amazing benefit. - The culinary team was constantly cooking meals that would be made available practically every lunch time. You'd almost never have to go buy lunch there if you were quick enough. - Extremely rapid growth meant that driving initiatives actually resulted in really tangible results that you wouldn't normally see in a developed market
Svantaggi
- Salaries were quite bad, well under market rate for most roles. There isn't any ESOP plan to make up for it either. Conversations with my colleagues still working there indicate that the situation hasn't improved since I left. - The company experienced explosive growth under covid. As a result, team sizes swelled faster than the culture was able to keep up with, meaning that a company with the relative structure and mindset of a start-up suddenly had to start operating like a "big corporation". As a result, a lot of the fun and scrappiness started to disappear, to be replaced with red-tape and busy-work. - Successive waves of covid created monstrous amounts of work which led to heavily overburdened teams. (Some, not all, were impacted. The supply team was hit pretty bad for instance). This resulted in hits to morale and increased employee churn. Although a lot of new employees were hired in response, people had a habit of being hired very "quickly" so sometimes the personalities didn't fit very well with the wider corporate culture. - Some of the people who had been at the company for a long time were part of the furniture and honestly pretty incompetent. It is not a very technically inclined or data savvy company as a whole. - It's a very European company. Although it differs from team to team, a lot of people there are from Germany/France. This may be a good or a bad thing depending on the individual (I tended to find people often became very cliquey), but regardless some elements of the culture and the way people dealt with one another was informed by this demographic make-up (for instance, people tended to be more brusque and to the point with one another than is normal for Australian companies)
