Revolut reviews

* The company positioned as an Agile company. Now there are a lot of managers, managers of managers, heads of managers, etc.; * Plans are constantly changing; * The CTO wants every developer to use TTD, but in reality the process of software development is often NDD (Nik driven development) as Nik personality likes to set not achievable goals and to push "product owners" to deliver things in extremely tight deadlines (using his own motto "get **it done"). It leads to long working hours and burnouts. You can't say anything good about quality in such an environment; * No QA (literally: there are 3 QA engineers, who are working with mobile developers, no QA for the frontend or backend at all); * Recently they added 2 other opportunity to fire people. This is 2 additional performance periods (so it's 4 performance periods a year). They call it "performance checkpoint" and it happens quarterly now. With the only difference: there is no way to get a promotion or bonus, but you can get fired; * The performance review process is broken: you can ask people to review you, but the only opinion which is important is the opinion of your "product owner", which obviously can be biased + "product owners", as they are mostly non-technical people, don't really understand what exactly you've done + last "performance checkpoint" all the POs were ultimately asked to decrease marks they set for their team members; * As a result they started to fire people without warnings (about 100 people this quarter based on some internal rumors); * The way how they fire people is awful: this is an often case, when you have a meeting with a person in the morning, but next day you see just "Account deactivated" in Slack; * They use the "product owner" term which can sound like this is a position described in some Agile frameworks, but don't let to fool yourself: this is just a word they use to call ordinary product managers. Most of them don't own their products and act as proxies between Nik and a team. Also, micromanagement is one of the favourite strategies to manage people; * You never know what you should do to get a promotion or a pay raise. The only way to get is your "product owner" specifically asks to promote you, but considering they fire people (and "product owners" as well) often, there is a chance to find yourself in a team with a person as a manager who barely knows anything about you and how you've worked.

Lack of trust from management, if things are blocked / going slowly, you are not asked why or how systems can be improved, you are instead simply forced to go faster or push others to work harder at the expense of their health. Micromanagement rules everything around here. Revolut style of management will remind you of Office Space or The Office, it is that cartoonish (you have to see it to believe it), except this is your real career you are dealing with and it is not really funny. For a tech startup, the product/ops manager to designer/engineer ratio is extremely high, every layer creating the illusion of getting things done (for performance reasons), but the true blockers lie further downstream that managers are either blind to or find it difficult to resolve as it is frowned upon not to "show progress" every week.