Very fun place to work! - Anonymous employee Squla Employee Review

The identity and job at first looks like fun.

My experience with an application process to Squla. Well, first you don't hear anything from them for a month, then they send you a test assignment with a fixed deadline and no negotiation. You have to start now. What are they expecting? That you were sitting in the lotus pose for a month doing nothing and ready to make a test assignment right away? Anyway, they sent the test assignment that refers to an attachment. Which is missing. The assignment itself is written in a mixture of English and Dutch which is all wrong and very randomly put together. So it took them 5!!!!! 5!!! days to send me the rest of assignment and to formulate it better. When I have finally received it all, it was 2 days before the deadline they have set themselves. Guys, seriously, can you yourself cope with deadlines? So, because there was a weekend, and the deadline was Monday I was about to ask to switch the deadline for +5 days it took them to put themselves together, when I received the email from them that they expect to get the result on the same day. So my overall comment: I don't know what's going on inside of the company, but the general treatment of future employees, communication and extreme sloppiness is not something I want to deal with day to day.

Central Location; Interesting product and business model;

Lack of structure and organisation: nobody really knows who is in charge of what. Everybody can take decisions related to your product, your sprint or you whole project, changing the specifications in any moment (sometimes without even informing you). Sprint scope can dramatically change the same day the sprit starts (and the next days too), just because somebody had some new idea! And when the sprint is over, nobody will agree on what you built, because everybody had a different set of features/tickets stories in their mind! Lack of internal communication and cooperation: both formal (documentation, internal chats, meetings) and informal communication. Nobody knows how something works, how you are supposed to integrate with some component. Even if the whole IT team is really small (about 5 people), you will find communication problems that you do not expect in such a small company. Priority number one for the core team is to preserve their status, their way of working: there is absolutely no space for any improvement, innovation, suggestion or change. And when they do not understand what you are doing, because it is not their domain, their programming language or their platform, they will assume it is wrong, the programming language you use is weird and you should use some library that mimics their favourite programming environment. You will soon notice everybody is scared by this core team and at the same time no one can do anything about it! The management cannot solve these problems, even when you prove they exist and you provide a solution for it. It looks like they prefer to ignore problems. Cultural problem: everybody has a strong opinion on everything, but nobody is in charge and responsible for anything. Missed deadlines, faulty implementations, wrong architectures that do not scale anymore, it is all tolerated, it is part of the culture. In the morning somebody assures you the system (you depend on) will be deployed in the afternoon, and in the afternoon that person is not in the office anymore, unreachable, magically disappeared. You miss your deadline (planned months in advance) because of that, and the next day the same person is back in the office, like nothing happened, protected by the management. It is unreal! If you have worked before in a professional environment, with the proper structure and the proper process, and you are an experienced developer, I strongly suggest you to move on and ignore this company.