Freetrade Reviews

3.9

72% would recommend to a friend

(134 total reviews)

Viktor Nebehaj

77% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

Freetrade has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 134 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Freetrade employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Finance industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

134 reviews
1.0
27 Oct 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Lots of talented and friendly people, all of which have left or are slowly leaving the company - Modern tech stack - Making changes and adding new functionality would be straightforward if it wasn’t for the vast amounts of tech debt that senior leadership fail to understand and actively choose to ignore - A once great mission that most people related to and were inspired by - That mission doesn’t apply to the company anymore - Profit and getting users to pay more now seems to be the sole mission - A fantastic example of how not to run a company - Has also provided me with plenty of questions to ask in interviews to ensure I avoid ever working for a company with similar leadership again

Cons

- Hands down the most toxic, morale draining and demotivating company I have ever worked for and hopefully will ever work for in my entire career. A simple Google about Freetrade being toxic reveals that this has been an issue at the company for a long time and will likely remain as long as the current leadership does - Toxic and incompetent leadership from Adam and Viktor. Neither of which are able to take any form of criticism, no matter how constructive. No responsibility taken by either of them for bad decisions made. There’s always a scapegoat and someone else to blame, the most recent of which being “engineers not delivering”. No. You’ve made countless pivots off of the back of awful business decisions. That combined with an absolute lack of care or wanting to learn about your own tech platform which has resulted in ridiculous amounts of technical debt which makes even the simplest of changes incredibly difficult to make. - Once ahead of the competition, there are now multiple alternatives that offer the same if not more functionality to customers - Again, this isn’t caused by engineering, but by constant pivoting on priorities and large amounts of tech debt incurred due to hacky quick fixes. A once passionate community is seemingly being decimated by poor leadership - Adam and Viktor have 0 understanding about engineering. There’s no understanding about there being a difference between front end (mobile) and backend engineers. At the size and stage of the company, you should be hiring and retaining people that are experts in these areas independently, not treating talented people so badly that they find employment elsewhere. There are already countless issues with the apps and the platform in general (check out twitter and posts in the community forum) and this is only likely to get worse, especially if the plan is to hire a bunch of low paid graduates out in Hungary to run and maintain a trading platform. Complaining that engineers don’t deliver, getting rid of most of your staff, then hiring engineers to use a completely different language to rewrite the platform (including Kubernetes lol) says all you know to know about engineering leadership - The way staff were treated during layoffs and redundancies was absolutely disgusting. All of senior leadership and anyone who was involved in the communications of this should be ashamed of themselves. Pretty much treating my friends and colleagues like rubbish with 0 empathy and 0 remorse. Just take a look at how other companies handled this. They made posts on LinkedIn and at least made an effort to help their employees who left to find new roles. All we got from Adam and Viktor here were jokes about “nuking teams” and horrible off the cuff comments in all hands. I’m not disputing that redundancies had to happen and hard business decisions need to be made, but there was 0 reason for people being treated and spoken to the way they were - Some of the remaining staff are also pretty toxic. There’s a lot of people now treading on other people’s toes to get things done and appear as if they are delivering more to senior leadership. This has typically resulted in short term “wow you delivered something that’s amazing” wins which are eventually turned off or require significantly more work to complete as the product/feature has been rushed and not designed properly - Plenty of nepotism at the company too. There’s a lot of people in senior positions that don’t seem to be doing that great of a job, lo and behold you find out that they’re old friends or colleagues of Adam or Viktor.

1.0
4 Jan 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Work hard to get you onboard.

Cons

- Was approached by Freetrade and encouraged by them to apply and take a brokerage position. They told me they had a great year in 2021 and everyone was paid 15% bonus and were in a great cash position with myjob role signed off by CFO. - Contract signed and handed notice in to employer with a week left until I started my new position at Freetrade in 7 weeks of 8 weeks notice period. - Was told a week before starting they no longer could no longer support/afford my position and were resicinding my contract effectively leaving me unemployed depsite approaching me for the role and encouraging me to join. - Was told they were only going to pay me a weeks pay which didnt cover half my rent for a month which left me scrabbling around for a job despite paying all staff %15 bonuses a few months prior for the previous year. - I was not the only person to recieve this horrendous treatment, they onboarded many new starters/professionals and left them redundant after a week. -The company states they made mistakes with the process and are sorry, yet they have made no attempt to make it right with the huge amount of people they left high and dry with a weeks pay. Why have you not contacted us since and made some attempt at compensation for leaving people in an awful position?

2.0
31 Jul 2019

Toxic culture

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Working at the cutting edge of finance Generally a good team

Cons

Horrible, toxic management Abusive and threatening messages from Victor and higher-ups - some teams aren't so bad but do not join that one!

avatar
Freetrade Response
6y
Thanks for posting your feedback. If there are any instances of abusive or threatening behaviour you have not reported, please do. You can email me directly in confidence as we have no tolerance for abusive behaviour. We have an honest and candid culture at Freetrade, and that isn’t something everyone is comfortable with. When there’s not a fit at work, whether due to culture or performance, it’s best for both parties to move on. Adam Dodds CEO and founder
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Glassdoor has 141 Freetrade reviews submitted anonymously by Freetrade employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Freetrade is right for you.