As everyone knows that zomato is now hiring 800 employees after two months of a mass layoff, and exit of senior profiles like VP and CTO.
Let me tell you the truth about the founder. He is an opportunist. He doesn't give a shit about the culture or any employee. The company is built on the death of many riders and cheating with low-wage workers.
Timing- Isn't it a bit weird that a company that did a mass layoff two months back is now hiring? Seeing that many employees got laid off from the top-tier company. It is a great time to employ smart folks as the hiring competition in the market is at its lowest. Or the mass layoff that happened previously was planned with the thought of hiring again next year with very little competition and desperate candidates.
Layoff: In zomato, it's hire and fire culture. I have seen many of my friends leave even after performing well. Honestly, sometimes I don't even feel human. It's expected from employees to start their day early and go late at night. If you want to leave early (around 6 or 7), you should have a solid reason for doing that. Here code release happens late at night due to less traffic. So it's expected of you to be available all the time.
Incompetent Managers- I have worked with two managers here. Both know the existing system as they were once an IC building that system. The issue with these people is that they grew up the ladder because they were the only ones left behind in the team. They lack real-world system knowledge. I have previously worked at amazon, and I know the team lead level there. But here it's like jo ruk gaya vo raja hai. It's hard to work with these people as they lack proper estimations of the projects and at the end of the day. The ICs have to face the wrath of the product teams.
People who are planning to join the company. Please do join, as working 24/7 you would learn a lot in a very short period of time. Also, the culture is team dependent, so you might get a team with chill environment.
I agree with what you’re saying about Deepinder as a founder.
But I’d like to make a few clarifications regarding our hiring pattern.
When he announced the 800 vacancies, everyone was mentioning the so-called “mass” layoff. Take a step back and analyze. We fired 100 folks (about 4%) across all functions. Other companies have fired way more. Even going by percentages, I think it shouldn’t be labeled as a mass layoff.
Ignoring other functions, let’s just focus on tech. Folks were fired because of bad performance (genuine cases of bad performance who were given prior feedback in the previous cycle) or because we shut down Instant (and Dining to some extent).
This layoff should be seen as course correction and not as cost cutting to impress shareholders. In fact, we are in hiring mode because we want to replace those low performers. There are repeated messages from the CTO to refer people. Even Deepi is asking to refer and keep the bar high since we want good talent.
Just my two cents. There are culture problems at a company level and at a team level as well for some teams.
P. S. Deploying at night is a necessity when engineers can’t ensure 100% reliability of their code.
In tech there are total 500-600 employees from which 100 were laid off. 4% as a whole might not look like a mass layoff but within tech team. It's a big number.
They removed some of the pods completely. I disagree that all were laid off because of performance issue. Many people were laid off as they did not created enough dependency in the team. Even I have stopped writing docs and explaining projects to others. So that they would always need me incase of any firefighter incident or anything else. Things you have to do to survive here.
I see. I was told that 100 is across all functions and not just tech.
Agreed. I didn’t say all were due to performance issues. Instant and Dining folks were affected because of business decisions.
He even posts 24/7 as work timings on his LinkedIn job post
Yeah I was thinking exactly the same. The employees are just a row of tables in their databases.
Ex Zomato, here. Adding my review:
Pros: • Some truly good people. Thankfully got a lot of business insights as an engineer too. • Pay was good. • Chance to make a significant impact on a widely-used product. Felt that everyday, perso...
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