Pros
Office in a good location. Market competitive salary.
Cons
Dubizzle has been sinking for the past couple of years, thanks to the incompetent middle and higher management. It was clear for a long time that the parent company had no interest in saving the company and they were just waiting to cash out the investment they made when they bought the company. Things were in a pretty bad shape when I joined and they only changed for the worse over the years. There was no focus on technology right from the start which unfortunately lead to the company’s failure. The company has suffered from heavy office politics to the point where only the suck ups got promoted and the actual hard workers were denied promotion with lame excuses. There were quite a lot of lay offs in the past couple of years which were lazily attributed to “performance reasons” or “cultural mismatch” where in fact they were the result of bad management decisions. Speaking of management, it was regular practice to shuffle teams every 6 months and reassigning employees to random managers. This had a huge impact on the career growth for a lot of employees since they couldn’t focus on their career path with one manager. People kept exiting the company left and right, and to compensate this the company kept hiring more employees giving them better packages and senior titles while the existing employees were ignored. The company refused to spend time and money towards the betterment of their technical infrastructure. The platform is known to have serious issues due to archaic tech stack and the lack of initiative to fix the existing issues. Every time there was an issue, blame games were played all around and then the issue was resolved with a lazy patch which would cause even further problems in the future. The company was technically “following” processes but not a single one of them was followed properly. One example is the 360 reviews which were used by many employees to back bite on their coworkers and humiliate them in front of their managers. The culture was developed in such a way that direct feedback was rarely given, people would rather tarnish each other’s reputation in the reviews and call it “critical feedback”. Truth was discouraged and people would prefer if you didn’t speak about the sheer negligence and technical malpractices that were being followed in a routinely manner. Surveys were not anonymous and if someone dared highlight any issues they were called out openly and were asked to explain why they highlighted that issue. Toxicity was all around and people were jumping to other companies just to escape this toxic environment. Dubizzle is the best example of a cool tech company turned into a disaster due to incompetent and self-centered management. Some serious course correction is needed and I hope the recent acquisition does just that. It would be a shame if this company has to shut down eventually due to a series of bad decisions.