5y
Hello. I’m the CEO of IFS and I’m sorry you have had such a negative experience. I’m glad you like the international environment and our new office.
TL;DR: reading your review, it is clear to me that I need to improve my communication with the team, since I’m afraid most of your points are either strategic decisions I’ve not been able to communicate well or misunderstandings. I take full responsibility for such miscommunications and I will strive to do better.
We don’t require employees to work constant overtime nor do we work our people until they break. We use scrum and our weekly jobs-to-be-done are set in planning meetings and each employee sets their own tasks. If you commit to getting something done, we do expect it to be done - as a company we need to be able to trust our team. If team members find themselves having to work more hours to keep up, I’m always available to support everyone to improve their skills or become more efficient with their time, but we cannot lower our technical level which most of our team members have no problem meeting.
Occasionally, if we have crashes, overtime of course can happen. As per my point below on prioritisation we have prioritised dealing with the fundamentals to avoid this and they have reduced significantly in recent months. When we conducted major server migrations some of our team had to work crazy hours for a few days, these employees indeed received additional days off.
As for hiring friends, this seems to be a misconception which sadly points at the fact that there might have been lack of transparency in previous recruitment processes which have led to this misunderstanding.
I can personally guarantee that I haven’t hired any new members to the team based on personal relationships. Every employee that was hired since I joined was found skilled and competent for the position.
There were only 2 members who I knew before asking them to join, these are two developers who followed me from previous companies, which I see as a win - if skilled employees are willing to follow you, perhaps you have done something right in the past.
As for the clients not receiving the service they paid for. When I joined IFS in late 2019, I found a mountain of technical debt and very unhappy clients who had been overpromised and underdelivered to for years. The previous tech leadership clearly saw the company as an IT consultancy, making individual apps for each client, whereas I believe we should be a SaaS company. Therefore, I indeed heavily limited the endless updating of the individual apps and prioritised building a single cross-platform solution. This is a strategic decision about prioritising our long-term clients satisfaction over short-term fixes, accepting some client attrition now (3 in 18 months) to be able to scale sustainably in the future. You may not agree with this strategic direction, but I stand by it - as a business model, SaaS is the way to go.
I’m sorry you’re not satisfied with our compensation package. I think you’re confusing two points in time, however - in the early days of the pandemic where the aviation industry was crashing and many clients reduced flights and subscription fees, we did indeed not have the luxury of increasing salaries even for deserving individuals - I’m actually proud of the fact that we didn’t have to let anyone go nor reduce salaries as many companies had to!
For the past many months we are again growing, our clients are flying and we have room to consider raises. Now, raises are determined based on market rates and individual performance. Not everyone comes out on top in that calculation. I’m sorry you felt you were due a raise and didn’t get it. As a manager, it is my responsibility to reflect to employees their progress, and I might have failed in communicating what was required by you to further advance. I will take this input as personal learning point. Lastly, it’s correct we don’t have certain benefits you might find elsewhere, but then we have some benefits that others don’t. E.g. we have a profit-sharing scheme where employees get 10% of profits each year, so I guess it’s up to you to decide what is more important for you.
Best wishes,
Alex Ribin
CEO IFS
