The most toxic environment I have ever worked in - Software Engineer Zalando Employee Review

1.0
Mar 24, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

40% discount on specific brands from zalando website Good work life balance Good hardware Gym

Cons

Don't join logistics and algorithms department (even if it is the last option in your whole life) -Management plays people against each other -Management is afraid from your personal development, I got lots of resistance when I asked to get an online course or attend a conference in berlin, what I see is that they want to keep mediocre engineers to be easy to control them (and controlling them is more important than delivering results) -I can't tell which is lower the IQ level or the communication skills level of the (so called engineers) -I worked in 4 companies in 3 different countries, this is the most and only repulsive team I have ever joined, instead of supporting and providing a proper onboarding they let you slip and laugh at you (literally laugh this is not a metaphor) -People argue on personal reasons not on technical reasons. -People cluster on personal reasons, so you can purpose a good idea and it is being resisted by the whole team just because you are the newbie or they don't like you -Super low level technical discussions (should we use the same code style/format for the whole team ? or should we waste our life putting reviews for pull requests only based on personal code styles preferences ? does a frontend framework (like angular) have the capability to edit a text field ? does it have the capability to create a pop up ? should we create a simple authorization module for a micro service ? should we use an existing one ? or should we just hard code one admin account ? (questions you can hear from senior engineers in team discussions) -There are lots of engineers who have been in the company for 2-3 years only doing support work (inserting some config records in the Database according to operations team request), and when it comes to real development tasks they disappear

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Zalando Response
7y
Thank you for taking the time to give us your feedback and advice. We are sorry to read about your experience in this role. This is not the type of work experience we strive to create at Zalando and we are grateful you took the time to share it with us so we can work on improving. We'd specifically like to address your concerns regarding personal development and the work atmosphere. We take the training and development of our employees seriously: we encourage regular feedback, offer a structured approach to building capabilities and create individual development plans based on our mutual goal of increasing the skills of our employees. We're sorry you were not able to take advantage of training opportunities while at Zalando. We believe learning should be a core part of our professional journey with upskilling possible not only through the programs we have in place, but also through learning from our team. Our supportive colleagues and thorough on-boarding are two aspects of working life that our employees value when getting started. Our tech colleagues have both a two-day company on-boarding and several days of Tech on-boarding dedicated to helping them settle in. With people from over 130 nationalities working here, we're happy to welcome experts to join our team and contribute to the diverse and inclusive working environment. We appreciate the chance to improve and are taking the issues you have mentioned seriously. If you’d like to have a further discussion please feel free to reach out to us: eb@zalando.de

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