Brill! - Manager Versal Group Employee Review

Laid-back culture, good pay, lots of employee autonomy, remote work is a-ok. In the past Versal had a very rocky product track record. There was no high level coordination, management or ownership - the design and engineering team had to scrap together what they could, which meant constantly moving specs, poorly written code, and a fissure between the two teams. But the cries have been heard and now there's a much higher emphasis on product. The atmosphere is fresh and exciting.

In-office food is snacks only, there's a strict 15 day vacation policy, there's a very dad office culture

Good hours, lax environment, casual policy on working from home, interesting technologies, above-market-rate salaries, and supportive coworkers made Versal enjoyable on a day to day basis.

Bootstrapped by the CEO, the company has little oversight to management. Managers disagree about the direction of the company, which leads to a lot of arguments and little progress forward. They feign interest in insight from the employees but ultimately ignore it, favoring practices and ideas that originated from their individual successes in past companies which may or may not still be relevant. No one at the company uses the product, especially on engineering, so there is very little motivation to support the product growth. While some teachers are starting to sign on as users, the rare success stories are not shared with the rest of the company contributing to the lack of motivation. Hiring is never a focus. They quickly realized they could easily hire code school grads and while some were useful the team is dominated by junior engineers. Since it is a start up, a lot of motivated people came ready to take initiative, but this often overwhelmed managers and was rarely well received.