HelloFresh Senior Software Developer reviews

- constant over-engineering - simple CRUD webapps take a year to complete - pretending to make data driven decisions when in fact the decision was made and the data is just found to make the decision look correct - leadership's internal propaganda department will never take the hard questions on slido and answer them publicly, instead cherry picking fluffy questions to smugly answer - crappy hybrid policy (they tell you which 3 days you should be in office) - departments spend 4 intense months every year planning the next year, then throw half of the plan out of the window - worst product owners I've worked with, the product org seems to think you throw the product over the fence when it's defined and it magically gets engineered with no further interaction - they don't own anything. - differing salaries for the same job in different parts of the company - childish politicking at the higher levels - union busting and constantly fighting the works council publicly - A explicit policy of making people work a job one level up while not paid for it ("squad lead in training") doesn't get paid squad lead money for (usually) at least a year - Rewarding the most senior people in the company for steering the ship in to an iceberg by granting them shares early (at rock bottom prices) - sends the message: tank the stock again and maybe you'll get more rock bottom prices. - amazon culture flooding in - if i wanted the amazon culture, i'd go work at amazon - culture of fear - barely anybody ever speaks up - Terrible promotion/salary increase policies (you're competing with your peers for a pool of money, if everybody does well then nobody does well). "Calibration" ensures that everybody becomes average - don't know how you expect great work. (tough times imply more people are average or below average, surprise!)

Extremely toxic company culture. The values are seemingly positive, but the CEO repeatedly makes statements that contradict them. They hire immigrants because they're ignorant of German law, some company policies actually contradict the law, but no one seems to know. Performance cycles are a joke, there are a million dimensions that contradict each other so every result is completely arbitrary, promotions and raises have more to do with whether your manager likes you and how much clout they have to negotiate budgets—if they fail, you get told it's because you aren't performing, no matter what other reviewers say. As a result, good professionals leave in droves when they're assigned to a bad manager, and there are so many of those, it's just a matter of time. The company never organised and streamlined processes from its startup times, and as a result it's failing in multiple fronts. Leadership predictably blames everyone for this, except themselves, while dumping money and effort in the wrong places and engaging in petty bickering with the works council.