Toxic Mess - Anonymous employee OptioPay Employee Review

This place is a toxic mess. I realised I had made a mistake in choosing to join OptioPay during the first week, where I observed naked disdain and a complete lack of respectful treatment by the founders towards my manager. I received no onboarding in the department I joined. Instead, I was told to set up meetings with various heads in the different departments, before starting a large 3 month project, with zero foundational understanding of the tech or data structures. After a few weeks of working there, I found out that I had been hired to replace two different employees, with two different job functions, that management thought they could combine. The expectation was that I would take up all the respective tasks of both these former employees. I later discovered that OptioPay had paid these two employees significantly more than my salary and had blatantly taken advantage of me. This example is telling of how amateurish this company is. They underpaid me, despite knowing that I would have access to former employee salary information, and would eventually figure out how much I was being underpaid. To summarise how OptioPay is structured for those entering the company: -Dominated by non-technical Founders who tyrannically impose pet projects (whilst micromanaging all employee tasks and projects) with timelines devoid of realistic time expectations, constant pivots to refloat the sinking ship, imposing their own stress and pressure onto the workers, and getting in the way of the work actually being done. (as has been mentioned in previous reviews on Glassdoor) -A few Department Heads who have been at the company for such a long time that they have normalised the insane working conditions and the disrespectful way that management (predominantly the founders) treat employees. - Finally, the ground level workers who suffer this systemic abuse, and rotate through in less than a year (in 12 months I saw a 30-40% turnover rate) when they realise how awful it is to work here. These employees find literally any other position in any other company and chalk up their experience at Optiopay as at best a mistake, and at worst, a waste of their life. Towards the end of my tenure, I broached my manager with how much unnecessary work was being flippantly requested by the two founders and then carelessly thrown away, my manager cynically replied: “that's just what happens here”. From my observations at OptioPay, situations where employees are hustled and burnt-out to deliver a project in a constrained time frame, and then that deliverable ends up being thrown out or completely ignored, can have a catastrophic effect on worker morale. It creates intense existential scarring, where despite your effort, the hours of sacrifice, the promise of building something tangible, was all for nothing and produced nothing, and your life spent at the company was a waste. Tangible work, the sense of moving collectively towards a goal that provides benefit to people, is one of the strongest motivational factors in one’s working life, but take that away, and worklife in the modern world reveals itself for the Kafkaesque, Rube Goldberg machine that it is underneath. Eight months in and I was experiencing burnout and expressed this to my manager. Nothing was done and my lack of well-being was ignored. This is not to say my manager didn't have my back, but exemplifies the structural and cultural problems with how tasks were assigned and how c-level management treated the employees. Communication and requests only went one way. I asked for changes and requests that would make my work life easier. These requests were ignored. Again, when I brought this up, I was gaslighted into thinking that this was my fault for not addressing the request through the ‘correct channels’. Finally, working at Optiopay was a core catalyst in my decision to move away from Berlin. I grew sick of the way employees are treated at many startups in this city, sick of the systemic and pathological manner in which management burnout and mistreat their employees and the industrial normalisation of this behaviour. Management at OptioPay are ill-equipped, technically and morally, to lead this company. I wish I had left sooner. TLDR This place is insane, and unless you’re desperate for a job, I would look elsewhere.