Speedboat? More like a sinking ship... - Engineering Camunda Employee Review

There was a time when the Pros section would have greatly outweighed the Cons, but those days are long gone. Camunda has gone from being the best company I have worked for to being something rotten at its core. I suspect this would be a 1* review if I had waited another 6 months to write this. Some specific areas for concern: - The company is littered with toxic subcultures. Camundi at the top hire colleagues from their previous company. In the most extreme example, the CEO had (or has) a fixation on another company, and decided that poaching a number of their staff might help incorporate the best parts of that company. Instead, it seems that we got all the bad parts - toxicity, copy/pasting processes that don't fit Camunda, and so on. That we maintain these traits despite the fact that most of those employees no longer work here, is a mystery to me. - The compensation framework is based on the idea of equality for all. Very noble, but not very well implemented. In reality, this means that US employees get Boston salaries (wherever in the US they may be), US-local tax rates, plus European benefits - the best of all worlds. At the same time, we can't afford to compete in the talent-dense areas of US. The result is a large chunk of the workforce who wear 24 carat golden handcuffs, and a damagingly high employee retention rate. It is impossible to get "Lean" when you have handed out such heavy handcuffs over the last years. - The company values conformance and stifles innovation. This is most evident when seeing which employees rise to the top. While common in many companies, Camunda really takes it to the next level. It's one thing to adopt cultural habits when they make sense, but its worrying when half the company starts forming sentences in the exact same way - "would anyone like to verbalise this?" was the flavour of 2024, while this year seems to be the year of ChatGPT. The responses to Glassdoor reviews will give you a taste of this. - Considering we have a company of just over 500 people, we design and enforce processes for a company ten times that size. Nobody seems to really care that it slows us down enormously, as long as we are checking what we are doing against the Handbook. A company of our size should be focusing on speed and getting things done, not imagining how well some process will scale once we reach 5000 people and ensuring its documented properly. Taking it this slowly is the surest way of guaranteeing that we will never get that far. - Worryingly, there is not an effective way of providing candid feedback upwards. The feedback culture from the top down is ok, but if you share a concern back up again, it could cost you your job. I have observed behaviour that arguably should have resulted in termination being swept under the carpet, and have also seen reporters of such behaviour being edged out of the company. It's a worrying pattern that the more senior the employee, the more they can get away with. - I have never observed such a collective fear of working with the HR team. Many Camundi do everything in their power to work around them, to avoid the difficulty that comes with working with them. Years of failed initiatives and poor execution has eroded all trust in the team, yet any feedback to the team is completely ignored. - Most importantly, faith in the leadership has almost completely gone. The CEO is a good human being and nice person, but it is extremely evident how far out of their depth they are when operating at this scale. This could be acceptable if they surrounded themselves with experience, but this is not the case. While many colleagues share this view privately, the Camunda culture (see above) does not facilitate space for such discussion, so there does not seem to be accountability for performance at the top. All Camundi are accountable, but some are more accountable than others. When reviewing this comment, Camunda leadership will no doubt consider this to be written by someone who they don't want on board their "speed boat". I am looking forward to the day my rescue boat comes to collect me.