TeleClinic Reviews

Nothing I can think of :-)

Very toxic company with a hire-and-fire mentality. Developers are being treated as exchange materials, the company underpays, and shows no respect for its employees. Management consists only of specific individuals (those who work in the company for 3+ years in people manager or product lead roles), and they work only 40-50% of the time but receive full-time payment, while the rest of the team, especially developers, must work 150% of the time to compensate for the ones who don't work. Very typical example of this work distribution was to all the time have "on-boarding" meetings with engineering manager and product lead because they skip half of the meetings without any explanations and then scheduling mandatory to attend additional meetings with developers later during the day, so that they can pretend that they also worked and sell the stuff as their own contributions. On top of that, at TeleClinic micromanagement is heavily in place, and I was told by an engineering manager that "when I don't reply for 5-10 min on his message in slack about immediate sync with him to on-board him on the meetings that he skipped, I should put emojis indicating that I am busy so that he can plan his time better". Yet, this same manager, who manages a team of 6 people, often ignored messages, regularly rescheduled weekly meetings at the last minute without notice, most of the time was late for the 1-1 meetings by 5-10 minutes without any comments about it. Once, I waited 20 minutes for a scheduled 1-1 meeting with him (meeting is 30 min in total), only to be told later after I wrote to him on slack, that it was rescheduled after 20 min of waiting time in the call. No apologies were ever offered. This manager also didn't bother to inform me of his vacations during our scheduled 1-1s, leading to confusion multiple times. He regularly skipped daily stand-ups and scheduled regular last-minute video calls at 4:55-5pm to catch up on what he missed during the workday because he was not working, and then claimed others' work as his own in Slack messages. So, if you value your mental health, stay away from this company. Additionally, the company's management positions are predominantly filled by Germans, who receive preferential treatment over international employees. The culture is full of dishonesty and disregard for employee feedback. Layoffs can occur without notice or opportunity for improvement. During my tenure, people left weekly, either voluntarily or under duress. During my time working at the company, I was never asked about my opinion or any feedback, and the retrospectives were constantly canceled. I had only once a retrospective that was used to collect fake feedback for the higher management when the engineering manager and product lead were sitting there and dismissing developers' input. I was told by an engineering manager that "I am entitled to my own opinion" once I tried to give feedback in this company. Furthermore, developers frequently handle emergencies to comply with German regulations and take on the work from product people, despite poor management and understaffing. Management is fully aware of that, and nothing is being done about it. There's no structured workflow; priorities and tasks change unpredictably, creating a stressful environment. You never know how the day will look like as meetings get constantly cancelled, changed, or added at the last moment. Task assignments are random, and architectural decisions must be made without adequate information. The manager, a self-proclaimed 'self-taught' developer, dismisses structured methodologies like Scrum. Despite week after week receiving positive feedback from colleagues and management, I was abruptly fired on the last week before the end of probation period and one day before a scheduled vacation, which I had requested a month in advance. I got a random invitation for an immediate call with HR and Manager (he didn't even bother to write in Slack about this meeting) where I was told that I am being fired without providing any reasons for that apart from saying "I was not a fit to a team" after hearing the opposite from a manager himself and colleagues less than a week before. The termination, executed during my vacation, seemed like a tactic to avoid full salary and benefits payment (public holidays and flex day). This wasn't the first issue with HR; initially in my first month, they refused to pay my full salary, leading to a lengthy dispute. In my final meeting with HR and a manager, I was told by HR "bad luck" when the company decided to terminate my working contract one day before my vacations were supposed to start to save and not pay full salary during my upcoming vacations. Second, after I asked why she is saying that HR pretended that she never said that. HR was extremely unprofessional and was laughing into my face saying that they immediately will send the termination letter to make sure that they will not need to pay for the flex day (company's policy a.k.a one vacation day that you are allowed to take only before the Christmas or New Year) as well as public holidays (Christmas and New Year). Also, HR was trying to force me to sign the email about termination letter which violates German law, and after I said that it is illegal to do that, HR said that she knows the German law. Throughout my time at this company, I also had an experience when a more senior developer was stealing my code while I was sick and opening a pr with my code copy pasted there and selling it as his work, and assigning himself to my ticket, while throwing me to work on a new ticket that he didn't want to work on. There were of course no consequences for that as well. Another developer was using chat GPT daily for work and communication, and no one ever said anything about that. I saw that he was applying to other jobs during his screenshares, so good luck to him as well.