Tooploox Reviews

Pros

- Very interesting projects which involve many people; many challenges and problems to solve - Even if the company is hiring more and more people there's still a startup atmosphere - Good benefits and pay - PEOPLE: very motivated, conscious of the fact that we're working together to accomplish a bigger goal; many experienced people

Cons

- There are many things to do, in different projects, so it's definitely not a place for lazy people :)

Pros

Great place to work, they take care of employees

Cons

This is a software house so All the cons are linked with this apsect. But it is defienetly not a body leasing agency

Pros

Great atmosphere and friendly people, astonishing offices in Wroclaw and Warsaw, interesting projects

Cons

Salaries could be a bit higher

Pros

Great atmosphere. Good and highly skilled people. Lots of learning opportunites. Highly flexible hours. Cool office (at least before the pandemic). One of the best places to work in Wrocław.

Cons

Depends on the client your work for. However, it's always possible to change the project you dislike.

Pros

Culture, colleagues, salary, projects, ownership

Cons

Not really a lot of cons, sometimes the flat structure is annoying but it has its pluses

Pros

- Flexible working hours - I have heard there is a cat in the office.

Cons

- New employees are offered more than is paid for current workers for the same position. No wage adjustments were mentioned. -The company doesn't protect employees from clients demands. You can be bullied, forced into working overtime or thoroughly log what you've spent time on, and the manager (if there is any in the project) doesn't blink an eye. - In most of the projects, Plooxies are not treated as equal partners for the conversation. There is no place to suggest to the client that the feature could be done differently. Don't even think about time to focus on improving the codebase. - Despite claims that Tooploox is hiring only the best of the best (disclaimer: I've seen that they've started hiring junior and regular developers), most discussions were solved based on participants' egos and not by their knowledge. - Not every project has a manager that will keep an eye on what's going on. - It is prevalent between Plooxies to sweep problems under the rug. For example, after every negative review on glassdoor, there is a request to write something positive - without solving a mentioned problem. - Plooxies do like "meetings that can be emails". The average developer would spend around 10hours on meetings. Weekly.

Pros

* Competent, passionate people * Interesting projects from US * Holacracy - you don't have a manager * True freedom of where and when you work * Competetive salaries

Cons

* Holacracy doesn't always work, in times of pandemic enduced danger founders let go of some employees, without an inclusive process.

Pros

I’d like to share my review of the company to counterbalance the recent three negative reviews which paint in my opinion an unfairly negative picture of the company. It’s made from the perspective of a person from the AI team. It contains a standard review of the company and also addresses issues mentioned in the negative reviews (in the Cons section). Pros: * Work flexibility - you can work pretty much where and when you want as long as you arrange it appropriately with your team and the client (meeting times that fit everybody, etc.). This was the case even before the pandemic. * Great, easy to work with people, eager to help when you have a problem. This is probably related to the recruitment process where the team fit is an important factor that gets considered. * Learning opportunities: experienced people to learn from (including many people with PhDs) and some knowledge sharing initiatives (e.g., a weekly reading club meeting in the AI team). * Focus on letting the developers make their own decisions instead of micro-managing them. This requires taking greater responsibility for what you do and being proactive, but in my opinion it works very well in practice and people like it. * World-class Machine Learning research produced by some of the people in the AI team as demonstrated by many publications at the top scientific conferences (NeurIPS, CVPR, etc.). You can check the list of the publications on the company's webpage. People do the research mostly when they have some free time between the client projects. * A nice perk of three days for self-development each quarter (and there are some other standard perks). * Flat organizational structure so you’re not buried under layers of management. * The leadership strives for transparency of decision making (e.g. shares notes from top-level meetings) and accessibility to various company data (financial results, sales results, etc.) so everyone is informed about what’s happening. Sometimes I think this might be too much (the company all-hands meetings are held every two weeks). They’re also always open to feedback. To sum up, in my opinion, work flexibility and a great atmosphere are the greatest advantages of working in Tooploox. Neutral: * An average salary when compared to the Polish IT market. I consider it neither a pro nor a con since the salary is simply at the average market level. * Holacracy is used as a system for organizing the company. It makes the responsibilities more distributed throughout the organization than in traditional, more hierarchical structures. A disadvantage is that it takes some additional effort to learn how it works. Some people like it, some don’t but you get used to it after an initial period. The advantages from a point of view of an employee are that it provides greater visibility of the decision processes and gives individual contributors more opportunities to affect the decisions. Holacracy also encourages people to provide feedback on the things they don’t like; this gets considered and the company makes efforts to address it.

Cons

Cons: * It’s difficult to climb the career ladder due to a flat organizational structure. However: - You regularly (~ once a year) get a rise that (at least in theory :P) should correspond to the increased seniority. - You naturally acquire more responsibilities in time. Your official position name doesn't really change, but you might be assigned a new Holacracy “role” in order for it to better “map the reality.” - Due to flexibility within the organization, you can get involved more in some administrative activities or sales processes etc. if you feel like it. - Recently an effort has been started in order to introduce a career ladder in the company to accommodate people’s needs in this area. * Most projects are short (less than half a year). * There is no common quality standard across AI projects (like a mandatory code review). The quality standard in a project depends on the project team and/or the client. Response to the issues mentioned in the negative reviews: * Mediocre projects, a greedy approach of the management with a focus mainly on increasing sales at the cost of employee satisfaction. - Response: Some projects are more interesting, some are less but in general I think they are Ok. However, employee satisfaction is also taken into account and there were cases when a client project was shut down because the developers were not satisfied. * You have an old laptop. - Response: From what I’ve seen, you can get new hardware without any problems. * People were let go at the beginning of the pandemic and there was no profit share during this time. - Response: True, these were some of the pandemic-related cost-cutting activities at that time. However, the people that were let go left on pretty comfortable conditions. * Large turnover lately - Response: It seems to be true. It seems to be related to the cost-cutting activities that were introduced during the pandemic. * It’s difficult to get promoted. - Response: It’s largely true. See my comments in the other section for more discussion about that. * Tooploox does chaotic moves that are hard to explain. - Response: This is just like in other companies - various things are tried, some don’t pan out. Maybe the reasons behind some of them weren’t communicated well enough. * The Holacracy system for managing the company is akin to dungeons & dragons role-playing games. - Response: There's some truth to that :) Holacracy has some advantages though. You can mostly ignore it if you prefer to focus on technical activities (and some people do). * Management blinded by their own egos and greediness. - Response: Definitely not from what I’ve seen.

Pros

- independence at work - great atmosphere - friendly co-workers - easy access to all necessary tools (software and hardware) - lots of days for self-learning - good and competitive salary

Cons

Try and take better care of employees who work remotely full-time

Pros

Great atmosphere Transparency Self-development Inspiring people Good salaries A lot of activities outside of work Employee happiness is a priority

Cons

Flat structure might be a con for some people