Nice experience - Anonymous employee Refme Employee Review

- great team overall, well loved product, large user base and growing consistently - smart engineering team and product team, positive mindset with dynamic feature evolution, improving culture of iteration - aiming to be as data driven as possible - good technical leadership and ownership, understanding of how and where we need to pay down technical debt and how to architect solutions at scale

- sometimes a lack of assertiveness is decisions in terms of process change or large company decisions, but that improved just before departing - lacking consistent visibility and messaging of changes to long term plans / activity of other teams

The product is good, and there are a lot of fantastic people working at the company, which made it seem attractive. Management talks a good talk at interview stage, outlining great ambition and prospects. The reality after on-boarding is very different, however.

Strategy was all over the place and changed constantly according to the CEO’s moods. None of the resources agreed upon actually materialized, and commitments were never followed through. Opportunities such as speaking engagements and meetings were casually ignored and constantly cancelled at the last minute, which made it very difficult to build relationships or conduct business credibly on the company’s behalf. I felt uncomfortable with the casual attitude towards paying agencies and contractors, as senior management would agree to clear terms, both verbally and in writing, and then ask you to get out of them even when there were clear legal contractual obligations. When I raised issues around this, however, I was asked what all the “drama” was about. This attitude of withdrawing promises also extended to staff. One example of this was the holiday policy. The company advertised – and specifically mentioned at every stage of interview – that it offered unlimited holiday, but as it turned out it only allowed for 22 days, which is on the average to low side for technology start-ups. Management would respond to communication sporadically at best, and often completely forget or disregard what was said and agreed upon, which made for a chaotic working environment. Ironically, as my contract was terminated with a week’s notice the week before Christmas, the main reason given was “lack of communication” regarding meeting arrangements, when I had in fact clearly notified all members of the management team of my whereabouts weeks in advance, and several times, both verbally and in writing. The management team then announced to the company that I – along with other team members – had been let do due to “performance issues”. Such issues were not brought up at any point before that stage, and I have since found out that the other team members were let go for pointing out that the new share options contract contradicted previously agreed-upon terms.