Vantaggi
Compensation Benefits Colleagues Company culture
Svantaggi
Before joining the company I was looking to work with people on similar time-zones, and when recruited I was told the company was global and very well distributed. The reality is that, apart from Domains, the rest of the company is very Canada/US-centric, and everything is organised and made to work for people in there. To make a clear example of what I am saying: the company I'll be joining in a week use times in UTC for all the meetings/communications. Apart from my line manager and my team-mates, I always felt completely isolated and ignored by the rest of the company. While my line manager was off for weeks, for instance, I was trying to know more about the hiring process for my team, and I texted the person directly on Slack, tagged her on Greenhouse and emailed her, but I've never got an answer. I felt disrespected and powerless. When he came back, I told him that I had the impression that the hiring for my team was not a priority for the company and he double checked with her, who confirmed. So, I was an Engineering Manager and I had no access to the information I needed to do my job, and that was for sure the most frustrating aspect of working for Tucows. On top of that, especially at the beginning, I had different problems with HR due to a complete disorganisation for people employed in the UK: on-call unpaid for two months, being refunded took forever, health insurance only started when I explicitly asked, and, even more important, my pension was not being paid even if mandatory in the UK (I realised it after 4 months). In the end everything was fixed after my complaints, but that was a clear symptom of the company not being set up properly for people working from outside North America. Regarding the C-level people, I must say I have never been in a company where the CTO has never attended a single meeting/demo of my team. I understand about priorities, but that's the very basic of celebrating successes and motivating people. That's a clear message that tells us that what we are building is not important for the rest of the company.
