My poorest work experience in 32 years ! - Account Executive France Cosuno Ventures Employee Review

Smart colleagues, Hands-on leaders, no bloated middle management. Strong product and position in a huge market.

No benefits but salaries are decent.

You get work with modern technologies and modern software development methodologies.

The codebase is not really well thought, having been quickly written just to push features. The company has a work culture where productivity is the most important and nothing else matters. This means that you get no compassion or understanding with your personal problems. In the early days of working for this company, a close family member of mine came down with a severe illness and was hospitalised in the Intensive-care unit in need of an open chest heart surgery, very close to passing away. Due to this, I wasn't able to perform up to my usual standard. When I explained the situation to the CTO who was also my team lead he replied "let's hope this doesn't happen again". Besides this, the work culture doesn't support any mutual help between it's co-workers. For example, during the mentioned time where my close family member nearly passed away, one of my former co-workers used the extra work required to review my code as an excuse for not performing as much as usual in the sprint retrospective. Code review is a basic software development step and shouldn't be seen as a waste of time. By stating his performance was hampered by it, instead of explaining that their focus was moved to other equally as important tasks, I became aware of the stated company's work culture and what it truly values in software development. Due to this, I don't blame them for this behaviour, because in such a competitive environment this excuse just felt like a survival tactic. During one sprint, most of the team was out sick and by the end of the sprint the CTO once again complained that the tasks were not done, disregarding the external factors. On a bi-weekly basis we get feedback on 1on1 meetings by the same CTO. Unfortunately the feedback provided most of the time is not really actionable and more like a list of complaints of things that you should get better or that he is not liking about you. There is no clear set expectations or goals when you join the team, all of this feedback is purely based on his feeling and opinions. Despite being told the expectation would be to ramp up in 3 months, after 1 month I was getting constant complaints by the same team lead of not being good enough. In only two months, during the supposed 3 month ramp up period, the CTO went against his word and I was finally let go while sick with pneumonia.