Where do you even start!
I was part of OpenMarket prior to being aquired by InfoBip. OpenMarket was hands down the best company I've ever worked for. Communication was excellent, everyone knew the company objectives and worked hard to achive them because they cared. Management was honest and took care of employees. The teams were filled with highly talented people who all geninuely liked each other. Every company likes to say they are a family, OM was one of the rare cases where that was actually true. As a result people stuck around in competive markets Like Seattle and London, often for 10+ years. There was visible improvements every year. We were profitable every single year with doublt digit growth. Revenue per employee was 10x that of InfoBip.
When InfoBip bought us everyone was positive and highly motivated to make it a success. They intially said the right things.. everyone had a place, that they'd take the time to understand our culture and what made us successful. Then we started to learn who they really were:
* The company operates in complete chaos. There is no structure, planning, or communication. Startups this is understandable. InfoBip is not a startup anymore and has never grown up.
* The only thing that matters is speed. It doesn't matter if the solution is half baked, hasn't been tested, or that the people doing the work don't understand the problem.. push it out the door. Use your largest customers an guinea pigs without telling them.
* Sexist, racist, and innapproriate and unprofessional behavior is common and not taken seriously. When there was a complaint about a 4Chan like slack channel, which at least half the company was active on, they initially did nothing until pressured to do so. In responsethe IB employees in that channel simply created a new private slack workspace and continued on. I've heard multiple stories from many people about things that have been said by everyone up to senior management level people.
* The company is run by a core of long term employees based out of Croatia. It is impossible if you are not one of those people to have any input or voice at the company. OpenMarket management was stripped of any real ablity to make decisions indepenently or to lead and was often completely in the dark. It became apparent this was not unique to OpenMarket, this is a global issue within IB.
* There is no clear vision or strategy other than to make as much money from the planned IPO as possible. Other than that it's all just buzz words which don't translate into any reality within the company.
* Absolutely nothing from OpenMarket was adopted by InfoBip.. zero, zilch. While InfoBip does have some decent solutions there many areas where OpenMarket was much better. If the idea was not from them it wasn't going to get adopted.
* The "one-platform" initiative. IB decided that the OpenMarket services would no longer exist and everything would be moved over the their platform. By itself there was basically nobody on the OM that would have had a major issue with this, the business case is clear. Except they kept everyone in the dark and didn't even bother to understand what the OM platform was.
* The layoffs!!! 6 months in IB decided that they didn't need a major portion of the US workforce. The reason given was the one-platform and redundancy.... except that was a complete lie. In actuality the venture capital that funded our purchase told them US employees are too expensive and to cut 10%. Nevermind the fact that they stated a desire to double the US workforce within the next year and those people could have easily been reassigned. The way it was announced was handled so poorly there was a MASSIVE backlash with employees who remained. They ended up having to give out a large bonus to everyone in the US engineering to stick around and help them migrate traffic. Except they mistakenly announced this to ALL engineering employees. Employees in the UK and Mexico who were working side by side with US employees were completely excluded from any bonuses even though they all knew about them. Then they promised they wouldn't do this again, that everyone had a job/future, and they'd be better and had learned their lesson... then when the migration was nearly complete they did it again. This time all of the US engineering was let go, with much worse severence packages. The US business side, UK and Mexico engineering remain but at this point the damage is done and the flood of people that had been leaving globally is now everyone that remains looking for the door.
Bottom line is management has ZERO geniune empathy for employees. You can't trust anything they say or do. The business is good right now but that won't continue long term when everyone is unhappy and you can't attract or retain top tier employees. Eventually it will trickle down and impact performance. You also can't expect to be a major player in the US market when every decision is effectively made in Croatia and Croatia doesn't understand US culture/laws/etc.
