A Short and Frustrating Experience - Senior Onboarding Manager Suisse Tech Partners Employee Review

The only positive aspect I can honestly mention is that salaries were paid on time.

The company is hostile towards its employees and constantly blames them for minor mistakes. Instead of receiving constructive feedback, employees are often scolded, pressured, and made to feel afraid. The work culture is based more on fear than professionalism. They occassionally tend to track employees down to the minute, which creates pressure and shows a lack of trust. Salaries are low compared to the competition in the job market, and the company does not offer fair compensation for the stress and workload. The CEO and CTO are extremely rude and hostile toward employees and colleagues. Their communication style shows a serious lack of emotional intelligence, professionalism, and basic understanding of human interaction. Their communication style is harsh, disrespectful, and demotivating. Employees are unfortunately taught to tolerate the scolding and fear caused by the CEO/CTO instead of being treated with basic professional respect. The company lacks proper management and real experience in management and consulting. There is no clear hierarchy in the development team or the business analyst team. Responsibilities are unclear, leadership is weak, and decisions often feel disorganized. The company also does not fully respect local labour laws in Kosovo. Employees are pressured to work overtime without additional pay, sometimes under threats of being fired. This is unacceptable and creates a toxic environment. There is no proper training in the company. The trainers are inexperienced, and new employees are not properly prepared. For a company that claims to be international, the English level is questionable. The colleagues in Kosovo are friendly, but overall the team is mediocre. Out of around 12–13 employees in Kosovo's office, only about 50% actually do real work, while the other 50% mostly just stays there playing games or try to "create work out of thin air". In my opinion, if the company laid off half of the staff in Kosovo, there would be no real difference in work completion. Meritocracy is an unknown term in this company. The people who get promoted are usually the most visible ones, basically the bootlickers, not necessarily the most competent or hardworking employees. The company’s biggest obstacle is its current management. If the CEO, who is the sole owner, were to sell the company to people with real leadership and management experience, it could easily grow to become a billion dollar company. Instead, poor management, weak structure, and lack of professionalism keep it operating like a startup.

The colleagues in Kosovo were very friendly and always willing to help each other out. The company paid on time and there was never a delay in salary. Additionally, you could learn a lot, especially about how to deal with bad leadership, finding solutions on your own, and training yourself to work under extreme pressure.

The working environment was toxic, primarily due to the behavior of the CTO. The CTO consistently treated employees rudely, showing little appreciation for their work and often finding reasons to diminish them. This created a very demoralizing atmosphere. Micromanagement was the norm, with employees not considered trustworthy and required to report in detail how they spent their time. This level of oversight made it difficult to focus on actual work and contributed to a stressful environment. The development team lacked a true team leader. Instead, the CTO assumed this role but was unhelpful when approached with problems, often responding with "I am CTO, not a developer." This was particularly frustrating as he was the one assigning tasks and was, in fact, also a developer. Daily meetings were a source of stress for all staff members. Everyone was tense before the meetings, worried about what the CTO would say, as he was very rude, often yelled at us, and never apologized. Task documentation was consistently poor. In my entire year at the company, I never received proper documentation for any task. Instructions were often limited to a single screenshot and one line of description, making it difficult to understand what needed to be done. The technology used was very outdated. We were required to use Oracle ADF, which is unbelievably terrible. The CTO gave us a 14-hour course to learn it over 1-2 weeks, followed by a simple CRUD form as a test task. After that, we were assigned highly complicated tasks in ADF, despite the CTO not having a good understanding of ADF himself. Overtime was not paid, even when the CTO called meetings on Teams at 4:59 PM that lasted for 1-2 or more hours. This was not considered overtime, which was incredibly unfair. The office itself was decent but had some issues. It lacked regular cleaning, and there was often a lot of dust. Additionally, there was no drinking water provided; everyone had to buy their own bottles of water. The tap water was technically drinkable, but it tasted terrible, even the CTO when he came to our office didn't drink it. In most places in Europe, the lunch break is 1 hour, but in the office in Kosovo, it was reduced to 30 minutes because the CTO thought we didn't need a full hour. If we took the full hour, we were obligated to stay 30 minutes longer. Overall, the task management was poor, leading to overwork, underpayment, and a general feeling of being underappreciated. The combination of these factors made it challenging to stay motivated and productive.