Hydrogen Reviews

Hi, thanks for the detailed feedback! There is not enough room to respond to every critique here, but I will try to address the overall messaging. #1 - I am not going to apologize for working 100 hours per week and expecting employees at an early stage company (that can go out of business at literally any point) to have a strong desire to build something special. That might mean putting a few extra hours in then would be the case at a 1,000 person company. This is expected, not asked. Why would you want to work somewhere that fails? Jack Ma famously requires employees to work 9-9, Monday through Saturday. Our average hours are 10-6, with a lunch break, that is not even a 40 hour workweek. Plus tons of days off, weekends, nights off too. If you want to have a cushy high paying job where you can get 6 weeks vacation and not check email on the weekend, going to a startup with 10 people is certainly not for you. I am sorry that you had the wrong expectations coming in. This is certainly like being in bizzaro world, every job I ever had the CEO sits on the beach and works 20 hours per week. Ray Dalio took home hundreds of millions of dollars in pay at Bridgewater when I was there. That is great, he worked hard to make that happen, I am happy for him and shook his hand at the end of the year. At a startup, I am blasted on the internet for working 100 hours and making minimum wage, while expecting my employees to work 20 and making $150k. I set the right example, I have nothing to apologize for. #2 The company is only a year old. We provide 18-24 month roadmaps to customers, we work to meet those roadmaps. I don't understand this mentality that we are somehow always pivoting or not truthful to customers. They are coming to us for this reason. I have tried to get all members of the team into sales meetings. You are actually making the sales case for me, clients are buying into a vision and a roadmap. It is a cloud based platform that takes many months and years for them to use and deploy. TD Bank has 25 million customers, and has DEPLOYED the platform to customer in Canada. How many 1 year old companies can say that? This idea that I am PT Barnum is laughable, but flattering at the same time. #3 It's unprofessional to bring up anonymous potential arguments about regulatory, legal, or accounting matters. We spend HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars per year on third-party firms. Running a company, in fintech, or healthtech, or other complex areas, is not simple. We go above and beyond what is needed, sometimes third-parties don't agree with us, that is just a part of doing business, and it's a cost of doing business over 5-10 years (Look at all the challenger banks now and the hit pieces in the press trying to take them down). Please don't make this an indictment of my personal or professional character. This anonymous character assassination that exists on this site and other places on the web, by disgruntled employees and "anonymous sources" is tearing our country apart. Don't let it tear companies apart too.

Thanks for the feedback! - You get to work on a ton of stuff One of the great things about Hydrogen is the platform is really large and solves a huge need in the market. For others reading this review, you should expect this won't fit some personalities, and we will try to make that clear in the interview process. This is a big idea platform and it moves very fast! - Free lunch We also have paid snacks, beverages, happy hours, a yearly company retreat, gym passes, free healthcare, and many more perks! - Amazing group of people to work with Of course given the rest of your review this doesn't apply to me, but I won't take it personally :) - Very poor management I'm sorry you feel that way, I believe what you are really getting at is the need for more middle management. This is just part of the growing pains of a new company. It's hard to hire everyone all at once and there will be very close contact with founders and executives, which some are not able to handle. - Lack of trust from higher ups to do your job If you can provide examples of this it would be great. As I mentioned on other posts, everything at Hydrogen is agile based. All of the sprints and tasks are created and overseen by your peers, not by management. Everyone is virtually autonomous, managing their own schedules, checking peers' work, etc. For example, I don't think I have been in a sprint meeting for over 9 months. So it's hard for me to respond to this in good faith. - Founders have trouble accepting that salaried employees do not have as much skin in the game as themselves Yes, no employee will have "as much" but everyone has skin in the game in a small company. That is one of the things that should draw you, the ability to help grow something. Every Hydrogen employee has equity, the average salary is over $100k, full perks and benefits, plus in 2018 we even paid $100k in bonuses, which is unheard of for a company in its first year. That is skin in the game to me. The average American makes approximately $45k, so I think there just might be a lack of perspective here. I expect more and will challenge people more, because we didn't hire them to be average. - Products are sold as being complete without there even being code done. This leads to sloppy quick fix products because we are selling things we do not have Again I think this needs some perspective, at the time of this review the company is barely a year old. There is obviously some level of sales for a new company, and sales and growth are the very engine that drives a startup. Tesla had over 500,000 pre-sale orders on the Model 3 years before it was ready. Hydrogen is a cloud based platform, we don't make and ship products one at a time. The product is never "done. " We have extremely large clients like TD Bank (25 million customers) that have the platform in production, so this comment is not painting the full picture. Anyone applying to a role needs to understand it's a 1 year old product in the cloud that is constantly getting new additions and upgrades. You must be comfortable with the SaaS model to be here. - You will not have much (if any) say in the overall direction of the company Again, I need to understand your perspective and expectations to answer this. Do we allow entry level employees to be on the Board of Directors? No. Do we constantly have strategy meetings, product roadmaps, whiteboarding? Yes. We even have a Chemistry Lab program where employees could get $10k to start a new product within the company (or even outside of it). What 1-year old company does that? If you want to completely control the direction of a product or company, well you will need to put the sweat equity in to start your own company. You can't expect to come to a 30+ person company with a product in the market and real customers and completely overhaul the strategy or vision as a new employee. - Founders will never take responsibility for mistakes. It is always someone else's fault To reiterate, Hydrogen uses an agile model, so yes, it is always the team's fault. You can't be in an agile environment and expect for the founders to simply fall on their sword, this leads to no ownership. It's not an NFL football team where the coach calls the plays - it's upside down, the employees call the plays. The team accepts ownership and needs to make sure everyone is held accountable. Ownership and accountability are a big part of the Hydrogen culture. - A general toxic and unhappy work environment due to the culture instilled by management Company culture is what you make of it. We abide by our company culture, either you buy into it or you don't. We make it very clear for new interviewees that the company culture that we have on our site is what we expect. It's not BS.