Chaos and little flexibility - Software Engineer shyftplan Employee Review

The company's greatest strength lies in its exceptional colleagues who genuinely make work life better and create a truly supportive environment where people look out for each other. The company culture is robust, featuring engaging events and team activities that foster genuine connections beyond just work relationships. The office location is absolutely prime - situated in trendy Kreuzberg right above Ritterbutzke, offering fantastic access to the vibrant neighborhood scene with its cafes, restaurants, and nightlife. Additionally, the company offers a strong product with solid market positioning, giving employees confidence in what they're building and selling.

The company suffers from excessive bureaucracy and a chaotic work environment characterized by a severe lack of trust in employees. Despite leadership claims to the contrary, there is pervasive micromanagement through an overwhelming number of reviews, status updates, and check-ins required from multiple stakeholders. This suffocating review process strips employees of any real autonomy or creative freedom, reducing meaningful work to simply ensuring every "checkbox is ticked." The constant need for approval and validation at every step creates an environment where employees feel micromanaged and constrained. The organization feels perpetually reactive, constantly running from one initiative to another with frequent strategic pivots and restructuring that create significant instability. Ultimately, the focus shifts from producing quality work or innovative solutions to merely completing compliance tasks and making sure all the procedural boxes are checked.

The product provides real value on the shopfloor. The development of the whole product suite makes a lot of sense. The team is amazing and collaboration projects are a lot of fun with engineering, design and other departments. The office is very modern and very accessible within the city. The problems that customers face are very different and interesting to get into - even though access to important stakeholders is not always very easy.

Overwork - 10hr days normal. Role model management in tech department always stayed until past 10pm. A pizza to the teams for another all nighter should not be considered a good exchange. Change of management / supervision - During my time at the company, my manager often changed and so did the approach of working with our team and collaboration. Micromanagement - Checkbox level leadership created an environment where creative and customer / business oriented problem in a collaborative environment was no longer wanted. Management told you what to do based on their beliefs or even we had to fulfill customer contracts, which created a sales driven company. Daily standups sometimes had several C-level people involved. Cold working environment - It is an open office culture, the room is big and yet it feels very "cold". Considering we had to be in the office almost every day, the feeling of collaboration was always clouded by the supervision of management and the "do's and don'ts" of how we can and should collaborate with each other