Recensioni Unbabel

Vantaggi

Exciting mission and vision - to become the World’s Translation Layer. We want to change the world and make a difference. Just raised $60M in Series C to fuel the growth and global expansion. Young and dynamic team that is energised and work hard play hard. Fun and modern offices, free food and drinks, surfing every Thursday morning, offsites are amazing, we try and hire intelligent, fun, nice, motivated people -... sometimes we fail but we’ve been good at saving our great culture even in times of hyper growth (from 30-250 in the last 3 years). We’ve also learned to help move negative people on - yes you will have read some of their whiny 😫 reviews - it’s always amazing to see the positive changes when they are gone :). Couldn’t be happier with our progress, direction and outlook. This is the place to be if you want to experience a fast growing startup disrupting an entire industry.

Svantaggi

Fast paced, change is the norm - welcome to startups - not for the faint hearted

Consigli per i dirigenti

Keep growing, keep learning, keep having fun, keep our culture, enjoy the ride!

Vantaggi

Positive environment with people that genuinely care about the work they do. Good work/life balance compared to other start ups. Above average investment in the culture- giving people opportunities to discover how to help each other. Huge market opportunity and good enterprise customers and investors to validate the products. A lot of people have not worked in a start up before, which can be a good and bad thing-... but it leads to a more diverse set of experiences to draw from.

Svantaggi

The headquarters office, being by far the largest, sometimes excludes people from the others - communication can be improved here. Still in a mode of organized chaos as the company moves into the next stage of growth. There are a lot of ideas about important policies and structure to put into place but it’s very slow, and probably too much to take on at once. Departments operate in silos and often don’t prioritise... the same things. Many first-time managers who get caught up in details and trying to do everything instead of supporting and trusting their teams. Lots of changes in process and strategy that don’t always go smoothly due to lack of preparation or communication. All these problems are solvable and nothing unusual for a company at this stage.

Consigli per i dirigenti

Overcommunicate and make sure departments are in sync. Prepare people for changes and prioritise the key programs that will keep good people from leaving (career paths, development opportunities, inclusion in company decisions)

Vantaggi

Great people with lots of talent that (still) work at the company, and make the culture not so bad. Interesting product, with lots of (unmaterialized) potential. Cool perks like food and drinks at the office, social events, surf lessons and decent office allowance.

Svantaggi

The C-level is absent from the day-to-day operations and has become less and less involved with the teams. Being out of touch with the reality of the company as lead to poor management decisions, like hiring and promoting managers that have big egos but no leadership skills, are constantly micromanaging, are not open to feedback, have no ownership and accountability and always blame others for their mistakes or poor... performance. Many times, promotions, especially within the leadership team, are used to mask poor hiring that is underperforming. Other times, management positions are used to reward employees with great technical skills, but no real leadership skills. Executives and the leadership team often come across as amateurs, with a lack of real vision and strategy, and unwilling to fix things. In some teams, especially within Sales, there is a culture of fear where people refrain from speaking up. Because of this, some managers are firing competent and talented people simply because they give feedback or show disagreement. However, people are being told that they are being let go on grounds of lack of performance or lack of team fit despite no real KPIs existing to measure this, the inexistence of previous feedback, and performance improvement plans not being used (even though is company policy to for everyone underperforming), or simply being set up with loosely decided criteria (thus always bound to fail). When letting people go, many time without a solid reason, some people responsible for it use intimidation tactics, engaging in borderline unprofessional behaviors, aimed at making people deemed inconvenient leave fast and without proper compensation. Also, there is no real commitment with career progression. Because most managers prefer avoiding hard conversations, they fail to manage people’s expectations about this topic. They favor overpromising or plain lying about the possibilities and next steps, they end up negatively impacting people’s lives, and pushing great talent out of the door. People feel that performers are constantly pushed back, while underperformers are the ones rewarded. There also is no real commitment with salary reviews, and often they skip the 1-year salary review they promise to everyone once you start. Moreover, some managers expect you to do more than one job position while earning the same. People spend too much time in pointless meetings (some managers are unreachable by their own team due to this) but no real communication exists most of the times – many people avoid confrontation, don’t bother giving visibility to other teams involved in the processes, and complicate situations that can be solve with a simple message or a 5 min conversation..Many times, this results in unnecessary conflict and in crisis escalation that could have been solved while it was still small. Communication is also hindered by a culture that doesn’t promote accountability, which many times leads to a lack of transparency. More often the choice is to hide information, to avoid facing questions and feedback, generating a culture of gossip, drama and misunderstandings. The dealignment between teams often leads to selling solutions to customers that can’t be operationalized and delivered, using quick fixes that damage the scalability of the product and operations, and most likely will end up in churn. This is further enhance by the pressure on the sales teams, which has to work unrealistic goals based on everything but real concrete data, and where showing off that you “work” long hours is more important than actually being good and productive at your job. Although they proud themselves in being customer centric and advising others on how to do it, the company is everything but that. More often decisions are made to please egos and as a result of office politics rather then for the real benefit of the customers. As a consequence, the focus of most people is side business instead of the real business.

Consigli per i dirigenti

Be more present at the office, listen to people, accpet feedback, and get rid of all the bad managers.

Vantaggi

Free food on Tuesday Free beer and snacks on Friday Free Surf lessons

Svantaggi

There's no clear vision of what's the product There's no development lifecycle defined Poor attempt to organize the teams into squads and then cluster, but based on no mission for each group, no clear development framework. R&D is driven by academic researchers Engines are put into production with proper testing Managers are more interested in going in conferences that actually solve real business cases. The added... value of the product is minimal, when clients will understand that they will get better quality results and speed by integrating their tools with Google Translate or Amazon for example, this company will die litteraly. They survive thanks to their marketing. Expect big churn in the coming year.

Consigli per i dirigenti

Keep your focus on business. Try to rethink your product to really bring value to your customers. Start being actually customer centric, for real, please! Put back the researchers in their place and focus on solving problems your customers or the customers you want to have really face. Hire a real CEO.

Vantaggi

Free snacks and beer, if that's your thing.

Svantaggi

For a tech company, their engineering department only accounts for 13% of their workforce. Most products are in maintenance mode, most current engineers had no onboarding and have to work on legacy codebases that have seen no significant improvements for years. The team is either composed by people who have no career plans because the good ones left and don't have the courage to leave themselves or by just hired... employees who were sold a different company in the interview process. Engineering keeps making the same technological mistakes over and over again, operate on a sunk cost fallacy mentality and cannot innovate. Research teams are a sink hole of money and work on problems that have no real world benefit for the company. The quality of models used in production has not improved in the last 1.5 years. Marketing is too big of a team, refuse to talk about metrics and funnels because they haven't been able to deliver organic growth for years, despite writing hundreds of unread blog posts, organising and sponsoring dozens of conferences and spending rivers of money in ads. Sales don't train new hires and expects them to perform at impossible levels, there's a fear-based culture, employees are stalked and their e-mail accounts are snooped. Customer Support teams are overworked, don't know the product they support and can't escalate problems internally in an effective manner. The executive team is a bunch of amateurs with very conflicting opinions, no vision for the company nor willingness to do what it takes to help fix the company's structural problems. The company is mostly operating in self management mode.

Consigli per i dirigenti

The board needs to be restructured. Hire some experienced C-level people.

Vantaggi

- Amazing company culture with lots of smart and kind people - Lots of room to drive business value - Super interesting product that truly transforms customers' operations and strategy - Inclusive and diverse

Svantaggi

- Growth pains! Continued adjustments are needed to improve work efficiency while driving hyper growth. Normal for any successful startup at this stage, though.

Consigli per i dirigenti

Continue to adjust to growth pains like you have been!

Vantaggi

- Good office location - Relatively flexible managers - Good "workspace allowance" policy

Svantaggi

- Huge differences in salaries between teams and between Lisbon and SF. Most salaries seem too low. - In Lisbon the teams are divided between 4-5 different office spaces. Although they're all pretty much in the same neighborhood, that makes internal communications a nightmare. It often seems easier to communicate with the SF office than with teams in other office spaces in the same neighborhood. - The... management aren't adapting well to how fast the company's growing. They're still adamant to stick to models that worked when there were a lot less people around, but that don't work anymore. It's ridiculous! - Formal qualifications are still rated much higher than actual practical competence. This means there's too many big egos to deal with. - No functioning training for new joiners - No customer first mentality. Instead of operating on a customer>team>individual basis, things work on an team/individual>customer basis. It gets very frustrating very fast, especially when the arguments used for it are always about the next round of funding

Consigli per i dirigenti

If funding is such a priority, just sell the company before the service is ruined. If you actually want to build something better start putting your customers above all else, enforce a no-drama culture at the office, allow employees to work closer together, invest a lot in internal communications and training, and start rewarding actual practical skills more than just shiny diplomas.

Vantaggi

- Bright young people left and right; - The culture (you can surf once a week, and communication tends to be very flat) - You can easily make friends and have fun while working; - Although things are busy, you can have work-life balance :) - You will work in cutting edge stuff and big brands

Svantaggi

- Lack of processes is still a thing; - Communication brakes often and people have to deal with the aftermath; - OKRs and Roadmap are a nice to have but not a thing...

Consigli per i dirigenti

Surround yourselves with the right people. Drop some of the micromanagement and please, please trust that people that give their best every day so the organization performs, also wat what is best for the organization and may feel frustrated when they feel left out or just not part of the conversation. Having that said, you have the potential to be the next big thing and your heart is in the right place :)