Pros
WFH. That is the only reason why most employees are staying. The WFH decision came because they started to hire candidates abroad mid-pandemic and so they couldn’t start asking employees in Dubai to return to the office and eventually became a remote company. Nevertheless, every now and then, upper management will imply they are doing you a favour by allowing you to WFH and remind you to be grateful to them. You’ll also be held under a microscope if you decide to work from anywhere that is in a slightly inconvenient timezone - except if you’re upper management of course, then you can work from anywhere in the world regardless of how it impacts other teams and projects.
Cons
Horrible upper management: The core of all problems (and there are too many to mention here) lie in how the CEO and COO run the show. They have no leadership skills, they lack experience in running a tech company, they don’t trust the people they hire in management (who know better) to lead the departments, they micromanage, never learn from their mistakes and keep repeating their failed ways at everyone else’s expense. No strategy or long term vision: Eat App is supposed to be a product led company, yet upper management run it as if it were an agency dedicated to few “special” clients which will dictate everything they do. The result is that priorities change by the week, employees burn out trying to achieve unreasonable goals, and in the end all these “special” clients end up switching to another solution. This is a cycle that keeps repeating. Forget about building a good product and just execute this one clients special requests without questioning the value Poor culture: From day one they’ll try to sell you on the amazing culture they have, but you soon realise it’s just a smoke screen. In reality the culture is determined by their egos, they dismiss feedback because they’re under the illusion that they know best. There’s no transparency and a lot of scheming behind management doors. There is no moral consideration behind their decisions when it comes to dealing with customers or employees. If it benefits the company then it’s acceptable. The only other factor they take into consideration is favouritism, they continuously praise employees they like on a personal/social level, and give special consideration when it comes to their promotions. They even had the audacity to inform employees that there will be no promotions during a certain period and then promote their favourite employees during that same time and congratulate them publicly. Unreasonably low salaries: Their reason for low salaries? We’re a startup! Customers don’t pay on time! In fact, most employees are paid 50-70% below startup market rate and at least 100% less than their actual value to the business. Employees were forgiving of that in early years, but fast forward to today, existing employee promotions are capped at 10-20% (if they even happen) and the focus is to hire “saviours” from ex(enter big tech company name here) and pay them an unreasonably large amount on a completely different salary scale. Instead of investing in current employees and treating them fairly, they wait for them to resign and then hire replacements of equal or lesser seniority and pay them at least 1.5x higher salary. This is not only unfair it’s also stupid, losing the accumulated knowledge of good employees is just poor judgment. But you can’t expect anything less than selfishness, and stubbornness from the COO, it’s as if increasing people’s salary is a weakness on his part.