A giant turned into a sinking boat
Pros
Colleagues are great, talented people are willing to help each other to overcome the company poor decisions. It's the perfect environment to get your hands dirty, as far as you can avoid the political side of the company. The office is great, although located in West London which makes commuting tricky for people coming from east. The discount benefit is quite good (40% on every website), although only applicable on items that have been on the website for more than few months, so not useful for exclusive sales or new collections. Work life balance is good, working tends to be quite relaxed as every single task or project is generally blocked for months behind bureaucracy.
Cons
A mix of an ego driven CEO with no experience and the Richemont acquisition, led the company to the worst period in 10 years. What was a giant before, now it's a sinking ship without a plan to recover. Many years of budget cuts removed every perk of being employed by YNAP, no more allowances, party budgets, learning budgets, but mostly headcount budget. The company lost around 35% of the whole engineering department within the last 18 months, praised bonus were cancelled for many years, promised promotions were postponed for even more, there's no room for growth and the result is that the most talented people, the ones that really wanted to help, have been forced to change job. The few talents that are still in YNAP are basically searching for other opportunities and the others that made their career just because of time, high-ladder friendships or because they were always answering yes to their manages are staying and taking the decisions that are crippling the business. The HR department is inadequate to say the least, with few episodes of reported mobbing. Every single employee complaining on daily basis and the morale is on an all time low. The new acquirer Richemont doesn't see any value in the company and have no projects or budget for it. The CEO is an old school person that in the middle of pandemic wanted everyone to go back to the office. The finance department is detached from reality and willing to fire a consultant from a day to another to fix the budget, while leaving entire departments without knowledge and with months worth of incidents to solve. There's also a big bias problem where the Italian employees don't want to work with the British ones and they refuse to involve them because of the country they are located in.
