Flexible, International, and Ownership-Driven - Anonymous employee Factor Eleven Employee Review

Some great people in the team created a generally friendly atmosphere. Yearly offsites are a nice perk. Fully remote environment.

Management is disorganized and often unprofessional, with excessive micromanagement. Leadership, including the CEO, gets involved in minor details, which stifles freedom and makes work repetitive. The company culture is close-minded, predominantly male, and lacks focus on diversity or inclusion. There is a significant gap in benefits distribution. Some employees received perks like gym memberships while others, including myself, did not have access to the same privileges or health insurance. Some employees have been with the company for years, despite displaying toxic behavior. These individuals often yell at colleagues and receive negative feedback, yet they are not held accountable and remain with the company, contributing to a toxic work environment.

The tech department at F11 is a 5-star company if you’re a scammer or an incompetent individual who only knows how to play politics. You can get away with many things and still get promotions if you give minimal attention to leadership. Examples are: - You don’t need to be available or reply to colleagues. - You can choose to ignore supporting other teams and focus on what brings you visibility. - You can double the amount of time off by always taking sick leave around the weekend, often for an entire week. - You don’t even need to be able to communicate in the company's languages (German or English). I’ve seen extremely disqualified employees, and the most obvious scammers get past a 6-month probation period, resulting in an absurd amount of wasted time and money. All due to the disorganized and illogical leadership, which manages to do so in a small department of less than 50 people. Good points for competent people: The company has remained profitable for a long time thanks to the great sales team, even with the incredible amount of time and resources wasted in the tech department. There are still good engineers, but they’re constantly undermined by terrible leadership and colleagues rewarded for politics over results. You get exposure to industry trends of big techs thanks to the leadership chasing and forcing these industry trends that don’t make sense to apply to such a small company.

The tech department at F11 is soul-crushing if you want to accomplish anything worthwhile. Very frequently, you spend hours of needless discussion to try to do simple work that would take minutes to complete. All that time dealing with politics. An immense amount of time is spent handling the fragile egos of others, especially the leadership. Decisions are all illogical and ego-driven. Even with almost the entire department seeing that many decisions are obviously bad, and are then proven to be bad as expected, still nothing changes, because leadership doesn’t accept any input, and doesn’t want to accept anyone else’s idea, just wants to force the idea they had to take credit. All this culture is spread across the whole department, making it very hard to collaborate across the entire department. If you are learning anything new there, being an experienced engineer or not, you need to be careful to not learn bad practices, because as I said above, there’s no critical thinking in any decisions in the department, no idea changes based on feedback from others, every decision is forced by leardership or the ones that carved their influence through politics. It’s shocking how leadership manages to be this disorganized and incompetent in a department of only ~50 people, creating politics on the scale of a tech giant.