Pros
Staffed by some of the most wonderful human beings imaginable. When I do leave there are a handful of people that I will be absolutely gutted to not work with any more and every time a farewell email comes through the all company mail group I dread to see who we'll lose next. The sense of friendship and camaraderie is obvious and a review like the one titled "Haters Gonna Hate" gives you an insight into the nicer, albeit a little cultish, side of that coin: it's amazing (yay!) for some (oh.). Project completion is celebrated and they look after us well with great work tools and perks. The Toronto office might have some HR issues (never been, no idea) but the Auckland HR team are attentive and thoughtful and incredibly caring - you will never feel like you're being "processed" and people like Jordyn, Vanessa, Melanie and Kim are/were a massive asset to the company. Flexible work hours are also a great feature that makes people feel autonomous and satisfied. This is still one of the best jobs I've ever had however...
Cons
Having been here a while now - one of the longer serving employees at the company now after several of the old guard left late last year. There is a very sad flipside to the exciting and positive company culture and it comes from two places. First, the vision is fiercely optimistic and often veers into the territory of naivety. Our CEO (wonderful man that he is) ultimately cut ties with a former product manager because of his unwillingness to abandon his more grounded and realistic vision for the dev team. It also means that failure is felt much more heavily (see: restructure) because of the constant go-getter mantra. Secondly the Vend "family" is, in truth, a clique and a very hard one to penetrate if you don't fit a certain profile of Young Attractive Extrovert. Exclusion from this is passive ie. they don't mean any harm they just don't realise that many people feel like outsiders there. This makes it very hard to challenge but it feels quite bad to be left out of too which hurts a lot of people. This also makes it very difficult to lodge complaints internally against your "siblings" as you feel pressure to not rock the culture boat. This, in my mind, is especially concerning given that a number of staff members have had multiple complaints of harassment (both verbal and sexual) made against them from a handful of staff members. If this is being addressed quietly behind closed doors then it certainly doesn't show and the individuals in question continue to demonstrate inappropriate behavior almost daily. Many brilliant and passionate female staff members left Vend without ever seeing these men face any consequences. Career development in many departments is also essentially non-existent. It often feels like relationships are greatly valued over technical ability in terms of promotions, far too much talent is being allowed to walk out the door because we don't realise how valuable they are. Some managers are more focused on developing their subordinates than others are, which sucks if you have one of the less supportive supervisors. Further to this, the company received some feedback a while ago that Vend was viewed by outsiders as being "nepotistic" which is true in a sense but the response to this was terrible. Months after the restructure when they started hiring again a number of roles opened up inside the company. On seeing this many staff members applied for these roles hoping to further their careers but for the most part the roles were filled externally leaving those that applied from within Vend feeling very hurt and dejected, I understand that this was partly responsible for multiple resignations in December 2015. Salary imbalance is a bit of an issue too; while this is more of a problem with the NZ job market in general I do feel that Vend could do more to fight this. It genuinely breaks my heart to say anything negative about a company that I really do love working for (most days) but there is a definite sense of declining morale as of late and I'm not sure people will feel safe saying as much internally which is why I'm here on Glassdoor. The company engagement survey is supposed to be anonymous but managers in the past have punished people for things they've said in these surveys which means that people who know about this just click on all the smiley faces and hit submit. As I'm writing this I'm actually tearing up a bit because I do feel like we started out so strong, I just don't know where it went wrong. If anything the problem is that we simply don't know how to scale this culture into a larger company model without "going corporate" or leaving a lot of good staff members in the cold.
