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Thank you for the honest review. It was not pleasant to read, but the management is aware of your comments and is grateful for them. The management team recognises that they made several mistakes in the transition to remote work during the pandemic. Frankly, we had a number of people who resigned within their probation period, particularly in the sales and marketing side of the company. The management, coming from a technical background, were not initially experienced at hiring and retaining non-technical staff.
Our retention in the technical team is well above the industry average (average tenure is around 3 years). But we made several mistakes in the hiring of non-technical staff, which we have learnt from:
- Moving to remote work during the pandemic, especially for junior people, was very challenging and we should have provided more support.
- We should use more take-home tasks during the interview process to better determine the candidate's skill set. This would have avoided several unpleasant situations where we were forced to put staff on performance improvement plans during their probation period because the quality of their work fell short of our expectations.
- Giving critical feedback during the probation period for remote working staff, without ever meeting them in person, ultimately resulting in staff resigning before finishing probation. This was an important learning from the transition to remote working and we do not conduct performance improvement plans in the same way anymore.
We sincerely apologise for the negative experiences that you and others have reported. This was never our intention. We do not agree however that any actions by the management team should be described as bullying. Of course, it can be painful to hear critical feedback. But critical feedback is not the same thing as bullying - it's a necessary, if unpleasant, part of management. You (or others) have not described any incidents that could amount to bullying. In the interests of transparency, we invite you to publicly describe any bullying incident here. We would take that very seriously indeed.
Unlike many other startups, the company didn’t make a single staff member redundant during the pandemic period (or afterward). We have grown to 25 members of staff, have won awards for our product and are profitable. This required a focused team of highly-talented individuals working together at a very high level. We are very proud of the team and what we have achieved together. We have made mistakes but we continue to learn and improve.
