- Hands down the most toxic, morale draining and demotivating company I have ever worked for and hopefully will ever work for in my entire career. A simple Google about Freetrade being toxic reveals that this has been an issue at the company for a long time and will likely remain as long as the current leadership does
- Toxic and incompetent leadership from Adam and Viktor. Neither of which are able to take any form of criticism, no matter how constructive. No responsibility taken by either of them for bad decisions made. There’s always a scapegoat and someone else to blame, the most recent of which being “engineers not delivering”. No. You’ve made countless pivots off of the back of awful business decisions. That combined with an absolute lack of care or wanting to learn about your own tech platform which has resulted in ridiculous amounts of technical debt which makes even the simplest of changes incredibly difficult to make.
- Once ahead of the competition, there are now multiple alternatives that offer the same if not more functionality to customers - Again, this isn’t caused by engineering, but by constant pivoting on priorities and large amounts of tech debt incurred due to hacky quick fixes. A once passionate community is seemingly being decimated by poor leadership
- Adam and Viktor have 0 understanding about engineering. There’s no understanding about there being a difference between front end (mobile) and backend engineers. At the size and stage of the company, you should be hiring and retaining people that are experts in these areas independently, not treating talented people so badly that they find employment elsewhere. There are already countless issues with the apps and the platform in general (check out twitter and posts in the community forum) and this is only likely to get worse, especially if the plan is to hire a bunch of low paid graduates out in Hungary to run and maintain a trading platform. Complaining that engineers don’t deliver, getting rid of most of your staff, then hiring engineers to use a completely different language to rewrite the platform (including Kubernetes lol) says all you know to know about engineering leadership
- The way staff were treated during layoffs and redundancies was absolutely disgusting. All of senior leadership and anyone who was involved in the communications of this should be ashamed of themselves. Pretty much treating my friends and colleagues like rubbish with 0 empathy and 0 remorse. Just take a look at how other companies handled this. They made posts on LinkedIn and at least made an effort to help their employees who left to find new roles. All we got from Adam and Viktor here were jokes about “nuking teams” and horrible off the cuff comments in all hands. I’m not disputing that redundancies had to happen and hard business decisions need to be made, but there was 0 reason for people being treated and spoken to the way they were
- Some of the remaining staff are also pretty toxic. There’s a lot of people now treading on other people’s toes to get things done and appear as if they are delivering more to senior leadership. This has typically resulted in short term “wow you delivered something that’s amazing” wins which are eventually turned off or require significantly more work to complete as the product/feature has been rushed and not designed properly
- Plenty of nepotism at the company too. There’s a lot of people in senior positions that don’t seem to be doing that great of a job, lo and behold you find out that they’re old friends or colleagues of Adam or Viktor.
