From Great to Grave – A Cautionary Tale of Culture Gone Wrong - Technology Lead MoolahGo Employee Review

🚨 Work-Life Balance (or lack thereof): Used to be decent. Now? If you’re not in Sales or Trading, brace yourself. Developers are expected to be on-call 24/7. Why? Because the boss insists on testing every new feature personally, without notice, usually on weekends. No QA team, no planning — just chaos. Imagine being summoned on Sunday while you’re enjoying your family time at the beach… all just for a “quick test” that unexpectedly lasts 2 hours. And there’s no such thing as compensation time off. You work weekends or nights? That’s just “being dedicated.” You need to “own” your task! 🌪️ Otherworldly Expectations: Sometimes, requirements feel like they were written by Marvel scriptwriters. We don’t have Tony Stark, folks — we can’t build fictional tech on real-world timelines. Salespeople love throwing these things on my plate and expected that they would get my support ASAP without consulting the tech team on availability, feasibility, or workload. When explained, they completely ignored. They thought they were profit center, they could do anything. We were cost center, we were liability of the company. When issues arise (often due to clients putting phone numbers where emails should go 🙃), they escalate it to tech without clear info, then expects instant fixes. We’re good, but we’re not clairvoyant. Expecting miracles on-demand isn’t strategy — it’s setting up for failure. And when we couldn’t see the error, they scolded us. As if they wanted the system to accept phone numbers instead of email. The sales team seems to think we’re Gandalf who has magic and could resurrect after dead. Hence, they never care about my workload. And when unrealistic promises backfire? Guess who gets blamed again? Imagine rejecting them, and one hour later, the boss asked: “Did you aggressively reject them?” Oh my God, although I was the expert, but I am like Dumbledore. I could die doing that within that timeline! ⚠️ Compliance? More like “compliant-if-convenient”: Despite expert advice from the tech side, leadership regularly ignored best practices, only to turn around and point fingers when audits flagged issues. The last update I got that the project to improve compliance was forgotten. Next audit is not my problem anymore. 🪓 Blame Culture: The company ranks employees competitively — the higher you are, the more raise you get. It encourages sabotage, gossip, and passing the buck. Moreover, partners from China love blaming. They always "save face" and blame us first, no investigation needed. Yeah, many times it was their Great Firewall that caused problems. Cannot blame the CCP? Blame us, easy target. 🚫 No Respect (Especially if You Don’t Speak Chinese): Non-Chinese speakers found themselves isolated and sometimes gossiped about — even ridiculed for birthday food choices (yes, really — No longevity noodles on your birthday? Weirdo! That was long ago, but it got worsened when the new sales team joined.) Diversity and inclusion? Not in sight. 🏗 One-Man Company: Everything bottlenecks at the top. If the boss is busy or away, progress halts. Teams have zero autonomy, and delays often caused by leadership are somehow still blamed on the team. Growth is impossible in a system like this — no one can act without a green light. Imagine the salesperson sent you a task that requires approval. The sales blamed you for not following up when the boss forgot to approve. 😬 Mood-Based Management: Daily work rhythm revolves around one question: “What’s the boss’s mood today?” People literally whisper this around. If the mood’s bad, brace for impact. Meetings become landmines. A company shouldn’t need emotional weather forecasts to function. People would literally ask each other, “Can you stretch your meeting until end of day so my meeting with the boss gets canceled?” Not because we’re lazy — but because meetings often turned into emotional outbursts. 💸 Below-Market Pay: After leaving, I got around 40% salary bump elsewhere. For years I stayed for the (once) good culture, thinking it was worth more than a paycheck. But when the culture nosedived, what was left to hold onto?