Product and Engineering are in Chaos - Recensione dipendente - Backend Engineer presso Personio

- The Product and Engineering department has had an unhealthy scale-up over the last 6 months by hiring new engineering managers, senior - staff engineers, product managers, and other executives. The Personio ‘culture’ can no longer be experienced because of this unhealthy ‘hyper-growth’, especially in places where entire new teams were just hired with little to no representation of tenured employees and without onboarding on the product and processes. - Choosing not to promote from within and not having tenured employees to lead these new teams has caused the new decision makers (e.g. product managers, product designers, product experts, etc.) to behave like the blind leading the blind - where everyone wants to leave their mark and pass probation without knowing about the effects of their decisions. - Team leadership has not been appropriately vetted during the interview process, and continuous feedback during the probation process is no longer practiced especially for team management (i.e. engineering managers, product managers, and product designers). - Constantly changing priorities on a company level (lately every 6 months, sometimes quarterly) makes it next to impossible to complete an initiative in product teams which becomes negative during performance evaluations through no fault of your own. These ever-changing priorities cause constant re-estimations every few months where engineers pause delivery and focus on discovery and estimations - often resulting in complete scrap and rework. - There is a lot of friction among teams, especially because many mid-senior leaders are new and want things done their way without proper onboarding on the product or already established processes. - New managers (in both product and engineering) don’t seem to understand the complexity of the product offering and the engineering that goes into it, often asking developers to reduce estimates and deciding on team priorities and product direction without proper research and understanding the consequences. - Promotions are few and far apart for tenured employees, no proper career ladder is available and there is no transparency in the process or guidance about objectives - many believe that the promotion case is left to the whim of the engineering manager. - There is no financial motivation outside the base salary - although virtual shares are given it's unclear when the next share buy-back would happen (initially promised once a year, now communicated as tied to a seed round - when the next seed round will happen is unclear). Furthermore, there is no bonus offering and annual salary increments are laughable for a company of this scale.