1. I used to believe that a company is never good or bad but a company's image is generally misunderstood by the image of your immediate supervisor. But this company taught me how a company can be a bad workplace through it's policies.
2. Company's policies are so bad that you would find yourself in a blue collar job with no labor laws. Everything you do needs few hundreds of approvals which generally require desk to desk follow-up because mails and written communications are not taken so seriously here.
3. Even if you are sick, your manager should agree with the fact that you are sick. He needs to approve the sick leave and if he wish not to do so, your applied sick leave hangs forever and you receive a lop for that month and also a utilized/lost sick leave that's pending for approval.
4. Something similar is the case if your swipe is not captured or you forgot to swipe-out on any bad day. You need to apply for regularization, which will stay in bucket of manager and unless your manager approves before 15th of the month, it calls for an LOP ! They are very much happy to enjoy free service from their employee. I had to take 3 days leave in my notice period, but I paid with 9 days payment. I had applied for leaves before resigning but they didn't approve. So now the policy is that leaves in notice period are LOPs, then it extends your last working day, and at last they approved my leaves so my leaves are also utilized so no reimbursement for the leave balance. So they awarded 3 days LOP, extended 3 days for last working day, then also did not pay me for 3 leaves, total 9 days payment into cost-cutting scheme !
5. Your manager will generally not approve your leaves or other requests because he's always pre-occupied with other works. So either managers don't know management or of course company is short-staffed. But they have management and marketing departments comparable to largest MNCs of the world. Only cost cutting will be seen in the product development work-force. They are start-up if you count their dev team and MNC otherwise. So they spend less on product development and more on marketing.
6. It was a traumatic experience for me being part of this highly esteemed firm. Talking technically their product do jobs as simple as stapling papers but they make sure that it appears as complex as the Quantum Physics. With such toxic policies of the company and useless architecture of their product, I could not survive even three months in the company. Even the higher management believes that a manager can miss communication via emails and it's your duty to talk to him personally for everything, be it reviewing your code, merging your code to master/release branch or leaves/regularization or just breathing in the office.
7. With such powers in hands of managers, some tend to treat you like their slaves. Managers threatened you with words like, "The last thing in the world I want to see right-now is you people(dev n tester) smiling", trust me these are exact words. You complete stories resolve bugs but the job still will be under your name unless manager merge your code. Even the Director here questions you, why you did not follow-up well, writing mails commenting on Jira is nothing here.
8. They use project management tools like Jira, but most managers don't know how to use it. You write comment to query, but that'll not be replied even on tagging managers. You are expected to go to their desk if they are at same location otherwise call and ask, because they will miss emails, notifications, etc.. It's laughable that despite using bit-bucket, every time you resolve a bug you need to mail your supervisor the pull-requests urls, give sanity demo to testing-team, and then call or go to his desk and request to review and merge the code. And then resolve same bug on release branch because your manager is not comfortable with chery-picking concept of git.
9. They use agile methodology, but daily stand-up is not necessary. My manager was not comfortable with Jira UI, so we need to prepare tables on confluence page and give him status and progress using excel sheet tables, welcome to good old days with modern technology. Scope of the sprint is decided by your manager and not the people who are actually going to work. The red flag appeared in induction itself, it's just that I could not spot it. In induction itself, HRs told, don't give feedback to managers for the goals they have set, they must have some plan and it'll be done accordingly.
10. All in all, my advice would be don't join this company unless you have no other option. I'll not take up their offer now, even on 100% hike, which I actually got, took up and now regret. I left the company even before getting any offer, with completely destroyed mental health. I thought maybe I'm not good enough but within a week after my break time which I took to recover from one of the worst mistake of my life, I received offer from an actual multinational company from Germany.
