Bruh it just goes on to show that being a founder is no excuse for having such a shitty personality.

Product Manager

no let it be..low life fellow.. waste of time

Software Engineer

I gave an interview with a startup which is bootstrapped asked me to complete an assignment..done it near to perfection but now you would be shocked to know that a socalled cofounder blocked my num...

Welcome to Indian Startups's Private Community

I gave an interview with a startup which is bootstrapped asked me to complete an assignment..done it near to perfection but now you would be shocked to know that a so-called co-founder blocked my number when I tried to reach for the job position/feedback.
If he doesn't want to hire it's fine but blocking 😂
shows how low life he is and short term vision.

short vision startup

short vision startup- Grapevine

So I interviewed for a SaaS company serving US clients. I got selected after three rounds (basic email chat, built a project, technical coding round at last) and got selected. 

Finally, it was time to discuss salary and joining date with the CEO. He was impressed by the about section on my portfolio, where I mentioned that I like to go on treks, hikes, read books, lift weights, go on a run, etc. During our call he mentioned that everyone at the startup works 6-7days a week, 12hrs a day and asked if I'd be fine with it as I have a "happening life".

I said that I'm not used to it but I'll manage and work in appropriate working hours. He seemed to agree on it.

But he ghosted me after that, and when I pinged him in the email thread; he said he's not moving ahead with me because my other properties won't allow me to "work as much as other employees".

How am I supposed to react to this lol

I didn't get selected because... I have a happening life?

Glad, that CEO let you live for a better opportunity

Growth Manager

Startups will make you do 10 page recruitment assignment include questions like  gtm strategy ,how to handle multiple scenarios , make you do product demo etc Only for the founder to come and reject you without reading into any of these. What a waste of time and effort

Startup hiring is flawed

Getting blocked by people who take interviews. Poor show from them, even if I got rejected what am I gonna do on their LinkedIn profile lol seems like a trend at a few startup’s . And then they talk culture entrepreneurship etc

Blocking

Customer Success

Welcome to Office Gossip's Private Community

I was in an interview with a CEO of an 8 year old startup. The dude was vaping during the interview. Kept saying “whatever” to all my achievements, didn’t even see my resume before starting the interview. Stretched a 30 minutes call to 75 minutes where I only spoke for 15 maybe. I immediately withdrew my application post the call. Did anyone ever experience bad behaviour from the interviewer?

Interview ethics

Marketing Manager

Welcome to News Discussion's Private Community

Shity job market

Consultant

I know sometimes we refrain from saying too much about our company. But exes can usually be talked about, since there's not much holding back.

Maybe it helps someone else avoid a mistake you did, or gain a new learning :p 

Shoot.

What's a secret from a previous workplace you worked at? 🤫

Not my workplace, but true story. 
  
 giant american retail company (assume it's W*) hires one giant indian IT services company (assume it's H*) for some maintenance work now this H* company has offload this work to small Indian IT services company (assume it's M*) which has a employee named R* who's one assigned to actually do the work but R* is smartass he's scouting internet for freelancer to fix the issues. He gets one junior guy P* to work for few thousand rupees and shares his credentials, vpn provider etc and our P* now messes up , in the whole scenario there's no safety lot's of mess total grey zone. 
  
 From knowing this incident, I'm like no one gives any fucks about anything, only if people weren't so bad.

Backend Engineer

Corporate Strategist

Last month I interviewed with NoBroker for a Demand Servicing Head position. The process went like this:

2 rounds of screening with HR/TA - was okay, good conversations. After which they scheduled an interview with the Business Head for the particular team. This interview went well too. 

After this they sent me an assignment - the longest assignment I've ever worked on as a part of the recruitment process. It asked me to write multiple detailed SOPs for the sales team, build a demand forecast model, and a complete demand generation plan for an oddly specific scenario. They gave me 5 days for it. 

I worked my a** off, desperate to get the job as I've been unemployed for some time. I did the assignment close to perfection - spoke to so many industry folks in real estate and made realistic assumptions, covering all possibilities. 

All in all I've not been so confident about my work ever like I was in this case. I submit and they acknowledge. 

Few days go by, I follow up, only to be given generic delay reasons by HR. Eventually, after more than a week they rejected me. When I requested for feedback on the assignment they completely ghosted me. 

I don't know why I'm sharing this here, but it's been hard. I've been jobless for > 5 months and every such experience completely shatters my already low self esteem further.

Disappointing Interview @ Nobroker

Hang in there, the efforts you made for assignment will help you somewhere in future. Good luck!

Project Manager

Welcome to Software Engineers's Private Community

It's gonna be long thread. 

I have been working as lead engineer in a early stage startup since last one year. 

Founder (20 years exp in Product Management) raised some money from friends & family to start it and but company was running negative from February and he put his money to pay employees salary for March & April and We were hoping for some investment in April but that didn't happen. 

During May & June, he was looking for funding more aggressively and even after having a good background in academics & top tech work experience in product management, no investor got convinced to invest in it. 

Our salary for March & April was delayed from actual payroll date by 7 days and 21 days respectively and We were expecting our May salary to be delayed by same period and our company was about to complete one year in first week of July so we had some one year benefits associated as well. 

But Boom, he invited everyone on call and tells that company will shutting it's operation from next day itself. And he will help us find our new jobs and he doesn't any clarity on pending salary. 

Although we knew, our company is not in good shape so salary cut or something might be happening soon but didn't expect this. 

Now, we have to find other jobs and also be unemployed while searching for job and also get exploited by other companies because we will be desperate to find jobs to pay our bills. 

I think, he did this just before 5-6 days of our one year anniversary just because he doesn't get legally bound to pay our one year benefits. 

I for sure, not gonna join any early stage in future who doesn't have enough funding. 

Just wanted to put this story out of my mind. Open for any suggestions you have for me

Thank you

Startup let go Eng team on 1 day notice

TLDR;

Did B.Tech in ECE from a tier 3 college. In college, explored different avenues and finally found deep learning and computer vision to be the most interesting. Did lots of projects, research paper etc. However, being from a tier 3 college, making a career in this domain wasn’t easy. Graduated in 2020, joined a startup as an intern with a stipend of 35k per month. 6 months later, the internship didn’t convert, although I worked really hard and my manager liked my work.
Joined another startup with a salary of 6.5LPA. Although I had better offers, I decided to go with this one ad they were providing WFH (it was peak covid time). A few months into this startup, I realised the founder had no goal, no vision, was given random  vague projects, founders would pick up any project that their client would somehow talk about, assign it to me without doing any market research, and few months later scratch that. I realised, there was no future here, and for no reason, one of the founder kept micromanaging me (although the colleagues and seniors were great). And by that time, I also realised I was severely underpaid, as one of my close friend, who was a year junior to me was paid higher. I decided to leave that place, during a time of mass resignations in 2022 (the founders did try to retain me, but I was adamant as I didn’t see any vision and founder was too rigid to listen to anyone). I worked there for 1.3 years, at the same salary.

Later on in August 2022, I joined a series C funded startup, with a base pay of 14.5LPA, at nearly 2 YOE. While the hike was well above 120%, in some time I realised that this was the salary that they paid to IIT campus hires. Felt a little demotivated, Also, the culture here isn’t exactly good and sometimes gets quite toxic. However, I kept commited to my work, and come March 2023, I got a 10% appraisal, for which the VP personally had a conversation, I conveyed that I had higher expectations considering I joined at lower pay (1/n)

Hardwork and consistency pays off

The VP did agree to that, and my manager and VP had a few conversations around this topic from time to time. A week back, VP called me and congratulated me, saying that he decided to do a off cycle appraisal for me and gave me 26% appraisal, making my base pay 20LPA. I was on cloud 9. I didn’t arm twist my company, nor did I even ask for a higher pay, I was offered it right away. 
  
 Now many of you might say, dude whats the big deal. People with 2 YOE make 69LPA. Well, good for them. But I just wanted to write this post, To convey that don’t get disappointed when you see such CTC polls on grapevine. Everyone has their time. I’ve had many other failures, I keep trying to move to PM role(after working in startups, eventually gained interest), appeared for CAT(didn’t score that well), tried many things to come out of this tier 3 college status and make a career for myself. Just keep working hard, stay committed to your skills, good Karma, and success will surely follow you.

Machine Learning Engineer

Cheating happening in a lot of online assessments. I'm a 2024 graduate and I've worked very hard. I've a consistent streak of 390+ days on leetcode. I'm proficient at CS fundamentals. I have knowledge of web, restAPI and ML. Recently a company visited (startup). It was offered 20L CTC for associate software engineer role. This company conducted OA in 4 batches and all batches had same qn. I'm tye only guy who got shortlisted from batch 1 and rest of the batch guys cheated and shortlisted. In the interview they rejected me for not knowing system design. I then messaged the founder of the company about cheating in exam and how crappy their system was. He didn't care. He replied saying that he already knows. Idk where the hell our world is going with such founders. For him it's about his company. For me it's about my job and hardwork. Is there anything I could do about this? And the guy who got selected cheated in OA and he was in the 3rd batch.

Online assessments, Fresher and Depression

Fintech influencer seems to have faked his entire educational background. Instead of IIIT he studied at ITI. Anyone have more tea on him? 
https://twitter.com/SatarkAadmi/status/1701565930650706306?s=19

Ravisutanjani Kumar aka Indian Mike Ross

Good stuffs. I went through the tweet. What a shame that all those fakeness got destroyed in a thread.

Attended an interview for a startup where they said all was okay and agreed to rollout the offer letter and last minute told hiring freeze. This is for an entry level role. 

Cannot name the company as I can get identified. Fintech startup.  Their payscales in glassdoor were showing high base for entry level roles in Business Operations. 


How do we make sure that recruiter does not ghost us . What are the strategies we can use to get the offer. These days, every recruiter in first call itself asking about salary expectations.

Ghosted by recruiter !!

It can be either a strange workplace policy, an altercation with a manager or absolutely anything else.

What's the most toxic incident you've come across at your workplace?

Hey everyone! 
Sorry for the title. 

I had applied for a company, based out of Hyderabad. A startup, hiring for its founding full-stack engineer. 
The founder had sent their calendly link to schedule the meeting. 
I scheduled once, joined and waited long enough to receive an email saying that he got caught up in another meeting. The email explicitly said how sorry they were. 
Scheduled again, cancelled 5 mins prior because of a conflicting meeting. 
They apologized again, sent the calendly link, I rescheduled. I had an personal emergency because of which I couldn't attend so I sent an email, 5 MINS BEFORE THE MEETING STARTED, asking to reschedule. 
They shared the link, I rescheduled and they completely ghosted me. 

They think they belong to the top of the world or something, because of a fricking startup? Although it's YC funded but that doesn't give them horns! 
So I'm going to name and shame the company. 

LANDEED
Founder - CJ Lin

Egotistical Founder - Such a prick!

Some startup from gurgaon sent me this as front end assignment

Frontend Engineer

Would love to understand at what age people are joining their first company/startup and how much are they making initially? What’s the average pay diff between people graduating from tier1 institutions and tier2/tier3+ institutes?

How much are people making in their first job straight after college?

Business Analyst

What is the future for smaller ed-tech players like Bhanzu, will they survive, shut shop, or get acquired?

Do you know ed-tech Bhanzu?

Content Strategist

Hey Grapeviners,
Need a professional help. 
So yesterday my HR reached out to me saying they want me to discontinue the job immediately because they are focusing on cost cutting. While they are hiring team of interns to do the task and eliminating full time employees.


I want to know what are the options available to me as they are not giving any notice to terminate the job while it has written in employment letter that any one of us has to give 30 days notice in written or if I don’t give notice then I have to pay 3 months salary.

Based on the agreement can I ask severance package if they immediately discontinue? What will be the better payment to ask in this scenario? What will be the pros and cons in this situation and how to proceed further?

HR asked me to discontinue without severance

Founder

Welcome to Confessions's Private Community

TL;DR: I joined a startup as a frontend intern, took on many responsibilities, but was continuously delayed on payment. After months of empty promises and low salary offers, I decided to leave. The CTO suggested if I quit, I wouldn't be a priority for getting my unpaid dues but I’d "learn a lot" if I stayed. I eventually resigned after one last month, but they delayed my salary again, and after calling them out, I was removed from company systems. A fellow developer faced similar issues and was threatened with legal action.

In December 2023, I joined a startup as a frontend developer intern. The core team had only three people. Even though I was an intern, I was their first frontend hire and took full control of their Next.js frontend. I also managed their Azure infrastructure, built an Android app with Expo React Native, handled deployments on virtual machines, and did some backend work.

The agreement was that I would be paid $12 per hour, but I was receiving monthly invoices, and payments were delayed by months. After four months, in April, I asked the founder about my pay, and he said they had a seed but were facing issues with converting it. He promised my dues would be cleared soon. Two more months passed, and I got the same reasons, plus delays due to the elections.

By mid-July, things took a turn for the worse. They admitted they don't have the money and couldn’t clear my dues for an unknown period of time. Instead, they offered me a full-time job with a salary of only $400 a month, which was way too low. At the end of July, I told them I wanted to leave. The CTO then said that if I left, I wouldn’t be on their priority list for getting my unpaid dues, but I’d "learn a lot" if I stayed. That was a big red flag for me.

Since I needed money, I decided to stay for another month to get that month's salary and then resign. I still wasn’t officially made full-time because they hadn’t finalized the paperwork, and my full-time role was supposed to start in September. After working for another month, I informed them that I would resign at the end of it.

When it came time to handover/knowledge transfer, I told them I wouldn’t start until I received my salary. The founder and CTO said it would take 30-45 days because of the full-and-final (FnF) process, even though I wasn’t a full-time employee—just a contractor—and the team only had three people. This was the breaking point for me. I confronted them, pointing out that they expected my work on time, but my pay was always delayed.

For that disagreement, they kicked me out of the company’s GitHub and Azure within hours. I then ranted about their dishonest behavior in the general Slack channel, left the workspace, and blocked the core team members.

Later, I stayed in touch with a backend developer friend who was also struggling. He hadn’t been paid that month's salary, despite it being well into September. He decided to pause his work and resign. The founder threatened him with legal action for "fraud" if he didn’t finish the handover. My friend knew it was an empty threat, so he found contract loopholes, replied to the founder, and was ghosted—no salary, no response.

Now it was my foolery too that I trusted someone's sweet words for so long and did unpaid work for so long. I shouldn't have trusted people blindly. And I have had my lesson, learnt a lot in tech

And I really wanted to share this, get different opinions and suggestions that can I do something about it. Like I cannot do something legally on them right now and I do want to name and shame them but there is a signed contract, and I guess I don't want legal trouble right now because I am too exhausted from all this

short vision startup

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