<Rant on Bewakoof.com> Employees got nothing for their ESOPs

Hi Grapeviners, creating a thread where you can post the name of a toxic culture company along with which department. This thread is created as a one stop place to know about Toxic Culture Companies whether it, Early/Seed/Growth Stage/MNC . #community

Quite a large number of people were asked to resign gradually over the 3 weeks. The impacted personnel include SEs,Some PMs, and EMs too. Looks like a massive downsizing. Around 30 percent of the folks seem affected, but I'm not sure on that number. No severance. A month of notice.

https://www.ndtv.com/business-news/byjus-faces-total-shutdown-if-insolvency-proceeds-says-ceo-byju-raveendran-6141875

If he gives me ESOPs worth the CEO's shares then sure I would have an entrepreneurial mindset.

Be it about investors, co-founders, hires, freelancers, family, or yourself

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.

"BYJU’S grew considerably since our first investment in 2018, but, over time, its reporting and governance structures did not evolve sufficiently for a company of that scale. Despite repeated efforts from our Director, executive leadership at BYJU’S regularly disregarded advice and recommendations relating to strategic, operational, legal, and corporate governance matters. The decision for our Director to step down from the BYJU’S Board was taken after it became clear that he was unable to fulfil his fiduciary duty to serve the long-term interests of the Company and its stakeholders." https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/24/prosus-questions-byjus-governance-says-indian-edtech-regularly-disregarded-advice/?tpcc=tcplustwitter

Where did you work and how much money did you make? Asking as it looks like a lot of promise of ESOPs and wealth creation has failed employees in this bloodbath slow growth, layoffs, and job changes.

The company had more than 6 layoffs in the past 10 months. Right from office boys to the company COO was affected by the layoff. The recent layoff happened 10 days back, where the company didn't pay their employees a single dime and instead gave them their value less esops to keep their mouth shut. The company is being run by 2 arrogant adamant co-founders along with their 10 other close ally so called the CORE team. The employees were on 30% salary cut since 10 months in the name of deffered and were promised that everyone would get it back with 8% interest on the cut. In every layoff employees were asked to leave within a day or two without even paying them for their notice period. Nobody was vocal about it as the founders had threatened some ex employees that they would make their life miserable and they will find it difficult to get jobs anywhere in future.