Its all a sham

Background: I work in a D2C consumer product startup, we have an in-house website and a growing tech team of 7 people. The whole business team is 100+. I'm a '23 grad from a tier 1 engineering college. I joined the company back in September when the job market was at the bottom and I had to take a 40% pay cut (21LPA to 12LPA) (while switching (the last company ran out of funding). I was at a higher than avg base in my previous role but the current role is 20% below the average. (15LPA) The company is in a growth stage and lots of processes are yet to be defined which leads to a lot of chaos but I get a lot of freedom as well. My manager is aware of the whole situation and we had also negotiated a 6-month review for ESOP allotment. My monthly reviews have been going well and we have shipped some good improvements and features over the last few months.

I am working as SDE 1 in a good Indian startup. It's getting toxic day by day. Late night workings like 3AM and working on weekends is normalised like anything. Since I am new to IT ( no sort of politics never) and have almost 2.5 Years of experience, I am facing issues in getting credits. Last appraisal cycle in January, I was nominated for promotion but wasn't given to me, reason: you have not worked with architect and he was making decisions. In that case, architect should have been distributed tasks to us. one SDE3 is leading one of the projects ( not a big one ) and manager/architect is not much interested and never join any standup or retro, I have contributed immensely to that. Now since it is completely driven by sde 3 , he takes updates from us and show his work infront of seniors and director + announces like his work and seldom we get thank you in threads. Like if you did one function or wrote complete flow, for both thank you. Because of all these reasons, my work is not getting recognised. There is no one in team to help in this. Whenever a manager or Architect show cases some features or release, it's pretty evident that his team has done it but when a sde 3 does it, it is not the same. It conveys the message all or 90% work is done by him. I would like to take some suggestions from my seniors and fellow mates here. Hierarchy - sde 1-2-3-4-EM I can't leave or switch right now due to some critical persona reasons.

1. They are the most overpaid people in India. 2. They have no work life balance and they don't even know what it means. 3. They think they are the best at everything, but they can't do anything right. 4. They are always complaining about their job and how much they hate it. 5. They are never satisfied with their salary or benefits package. 6. They are always looking for new jobs because they think they deserve better than what they currently have. Would you like to add anything else here?

Hi everyone, I am currently working as SDE. I do my work very well and i receive accolades from manager and my team members as well. But whenever i discuss my growth ideas with manager, i always receive same feedback i.e. i need to know about the other peoples are working on which task and i need to provide feedback in design discussion call. I am bit confused. I know on very high level about the task but not very much context. And i always provides my pov in design discussion if i am aware of that particular thing. My of our team member's work doesn't overlap with each other. In that case for me it is very hard to share my pov as i don't have more context. Any suggestions how can i overcome two above problems. Thanks all

We all have heard about the toxic culture of Edtech. Unacademy is now in the top spot when it comes to companies with toxic culture. Any company cannot be more cruel than this: 1. Abusive language by leaders - COO, CBOs, SVP, VP and other leaders treat employees as slaves. They themselves have made huge lossess and are burning investors money but when any employee voice out their opinion/asks for leaves, the leaders abuse employees badly even in front of other stakeholders. 2. Forceful long working hours - Even if you complete your work in 8-9 hours, you are forced to sit for 11-12 hours just to show the founders. People hardly work after certain hours but they just have to sit and waste their time. This is tiring and there is no work life balance. No time to spend with family. I hardly get chance to spen time with child. 3. Late night reviews - So the company has started this new way of conducting monthly reviews late in the night. People are asked to sit till 2-3 AM for reviews. And this review is nothing but a setup where COO abuses the employees. 4. Forced paycuts - We have seen a forced paycut for the leaders (VP, SVP, Directors etc). 'No appraisal' was still somehow digestable but how can a company justify the degrowth in the earnings of their employees. Company has money to sponsor TVF web series (Sandeep Bhaiya), invite Standup comedians (Biswa and Prashasti), distribute pizzas to all the employees but when someone voices out for paycuts, they don't have money. 5. No Flexibility In Working The company witnessed its highest growth and revenue when 100% of the employees were working from home but now the founders think that people do not work from home so they have called everyone to work from office for 6 days a week. If someone asks for a work from home, the leaders denies or ask to apply leave to work from home. Be it rains, election, etc - we are asked to work from office. Even during the day of election in Karnataka we were called in the office.

I am honestly just furious at the pay difference between the salary of an sde and a pm. Both work just as hard.

Has anyone here worked at Zerodha in product, marketing or growth roles? What was your experience like? How is the company culture there?

I've been hearing some pretty bad things about Navi's work culture - esp. in the analytics teams. Apart from the 12-14 hour days, apparently you're not even allowed to take leaves. If you want to go home for a few days, you're asked to apply for wfh for those days. If you want to wfh, you're asked to apply for a sick leave and then work nevertheless. Can someone from Navi or otherwise confirm this?

Just wanted to give some updates now that it has been 1 month since the last post 1) Senior Leadership from Tech (3) , a senior director from Product , Finance Head have all resigned. Strategy team has been dissolved. 2) There are more people in the pipeline and will get more clarity by month end. 3) Everyone over the CTC of 60 lakh has been asked about the revenue that they bring in and based on that, their position is being reconsidered. 4) All contract workers have been terminated. Interns have been told that they won't be receiving PPOs. 5) Senior Management Has been asked to take 20% paycuts. 6) Even at Junior level, people have been asked to take pay cuts or resign. 7) Lots of tools used in tech are being removed and AWS subscription has also been revised. Meanwhile HRs have been celebrating on slack channels that Yubi has been ranked in Top 25 companies for career development :/

Joined this organization as an SDE. Initially, had a great experience for the first few months, got to learn a lot. However, eventually, the management (co-founder) started showing his true colors where they would favor a few people who would say yes to everything the co-founder had to say, while others who asked for justification would suffer. One such issue is the lack of concrete documentation for policies, and surprise, surprise, the policies change based on the mood of the founders. HR, oh, where can I begin? I honestly haven't seen them work, other than salary processing, where they have outsourced their work like LinkedIn management and basic tasks such as wishing employees on their birthdays. This is perfectly fine with the co-founder, as he considers this innovative. Unnecessarily, we are forced to follow processes that hamper productivity, and we have to attend meetings for half the day. Still, they expect us to work for more than 10 hours when the salary is peanuts—hell, even peanuts are better; at least we can have them with alcohol. My learning is saturated, and there’s no zeal to learn as the manager and others demotivate you. The most frustrating part is the quarterly rewards, which make no sense, as the rewards are given to people who can appease their managers (confirmed). And now that we have increments incoming, they have all of a sudden started highlighting mistakes, finding mistakes even if they don’t exist. Like one such example was the co-founder asking us to write a script when the script was already shown, and asking for an update on a JIRA ticket when it was already given in the comments. They lost my respect when they started canceling people’s PTOs and disturbing people on their much-needed PTOs where they spend time with their families and unwind. The co-founder asks the PO to call and disturb the developer on their much-needed vacations after working for long hours and weekends as he wants to satisfy his ego.