Pros
Stories that make your friends and co-workers say "No Way!!!"
Cons
If you want to work for a challenging company or you’re interested in doing a case study for the Harvard Business Review on bad management then these are some of the things you’ll encounter at 4xLabs: * Interns - the CEO loves to hire interns because they cost next to nothing and he can mentally abuse them by openly criticizing them. Some of these interns quit before their internships are over and the ones that are able to grind to the end will have the pleasure of taking a photo op with the CEO and then writing a blog glorifying the company and its CEO. * High Turnover - I worked at the company for about half a year and during that time more than 20 people left. Doesn’t sound like much but there’s less than 20 people at the company so the annualized turnover is more than 200%. All the people that left had negative views about the company and most people leave after a few months. * Internal battles - the CEO likes to pit one team against another or one manager against another and then pretend to be the good guy in the middle that is trying to get everyone to ‘work as a team’ but in the background he’s telling one team or manager bad things about the other team or manager. * Privacy - if you use the company’s email and Slack accounts, be aware that they can and will be read by the CEO. * Poor delivery - due to bad management, the company cannot deliver customized solutions to customers who pay in advance so after a couple of years they decide it’s time to quit, take the losses and move on. * Contracts - the company is based in Singapore and unless you are a Singaporean, contracts mean nothing to the CEO because he will not honor them and if you think you can sue then you’ve got too much money to burn because it will cost you more to hire a lawyer to represent your international claim. * Salary - the company had a “technical payment” problem when making a routine and monthly salary payment to its Vietnamese developers. It took over a week to resolve. This payment problem conveniently occurred in December right before the annual and standard 13th month salary payment. Luckily for the CEO, more than half the team of Vietnamese developers quit so he didn’t have to pay for their 13th month. * Performance - if you’re good at your job then you need to take a couple steps back because if you outshine the CEO and begin to make him look incompetent, then you’ll end up on the chopping block like the last manager. * Con job - if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably wondering how does this company survive? The CEO is really good at taking investors’ money and burning it, taking money from customers while ignoring them, and getting foreign contractors to work without paying them. * One technical solution for everything - the CEO does not like developers to waste time designing good systems and in fact, criticizes them for it so if the site is down, or there is a high CPU alarm, or too many database connections, or any technical problem, the CEO will announce the following message on Slack “I will restart the server”. * Financially and morally bankrupt - any company that cannot pay their employees on time or cannot even pay for cheap Vietnam office rent, has some questionable finances. Lastly, whenever a company thinks it’s okay to scam honest and hard-working contractors from developing countries by not paying them for the work that they did, you have to ask yourself if this is the right company you want to work for.