You're expendable if you're in Customer Operations (customer service, banking operations, etc…). It's a segregated (us and them) situation. People on the outside despise you. There's nothing you can do against that.
Every other department looks down on you because you're not part of the "earning" departments. You're the "cost".
That's what corporate brainwashing does to you.
You're on the receiving end of everything all the other departments have done wrong:
- The CEO made a poor decision, (he let a lot of fraudsters in. He wanted to launch in as many countries as he could without consolidating all the broken parts in the company and app before, etc…)
- Tech created a bad line of code somewhere, (happens all too often)
- Design created a poorly thought out design, (or plainly stole ideas from Bauhaus and Monzo or whatnot because that's what designers do)
- Product created a useless feature in the app, (nothing has evolved in my time, they're twiddling thumbs all day)
- Marketing sold a malfunctioning app via millions of € spent, (they're the greatest bunch of big-headed and lying bunch of people)
Yet, you're the paria, the Untouchable.
There's true condescension and no actual bonding between departments. They've managed to fence everything. Product, Design and Tech are cherished.
For the rest:
- low salary,
- low to no recognition from your leaders,
- everything is still startuppy. Structure is none-existent. You wouldn't expect that from a bank.
- poor planning from A to Z. In terms of space (you'll be moving every two years at least), in terms of employee happiness, in terms of their beloved IPO (which they've always said they were against) but will surely arrive in three years tops.
About this last point: they're looking at ways of shaving off a bit of the payroll by enticing employees into an ESOP scheme. It's quite easy, you surrender 2-4 thousand bucks a year and get "stock options" which would basically quadruple in value. But nothing guarantees that your lost income will eventually be repaid by these stock options.
They're just looking at ways of saving money people.
There's a good chance you'll end up an alcoholic, coke or X addict after a few months in the job because of the pressure you endure.
Chief Executive Officers (you get two for the price of two): One of them thinks he's a DJ and surfs on his rich person aura to pick up girlfriends.
The other wants to be the Austrian Steve Jobs and keeps micro-managing everything although he's barely liter-ate enough in German. They've surrounded themselves of yeasayers (people who say yes to everything you have to say).
He's in a competition with this other person over at Revolut. It's like the Soviets did something bad to his Austrian ancestors in WWI or WWII and now he wants to exact revenge upon him in retaliation.
In this revenge act, he's opened the gates of identity verification to attract the greatest number of users. There's now a lot of cleaning up to do, and this fellow here is responsible for the mess. He's fired many people he deemed at the origin of the issue. He's the source of many of the company's troubles with regulators and employees. Not many people respect him in the company.
Chief Financial Officer (he's present or not, you can't really tell): The DJ I was telling you about in the previous paragraph. He's almost never there. Hasn't had a clear role in the running of the company. I think he brought in some initial capital and is a bro of pseudo-Steve Jobs. Enough to have three (not one, not two, but three!) positions in the company now. He's CEO, CFO and interim COO (read more about it below).
Chief People Officer: She brought her protégés with her when Soundclound crashed. So that means she fired a lot of people over there and then recruited them here. She's like the CPO, she knows whatever the CEOs want and is always there to please them.
Chief Operations Officer (or former because he was fired yesterday): Stood in shoes too big for him. Had no prior knowledge of Operations. He failed at all tasks assigned to him. He recruited people who went through consultancy companies and expect them to solve world hunger. They don't, it's as simple as that.
This guy was craving to be accepted by the bosses, he was constantly pressing for "happy customer journeys", ie (he loves this "ie" expression by the way) people who had gone from a bad perception to a good perception of the company. He spent his final six months in the company brining these same stories up each time he was given the mic.
Chief Product Officer: She's a good talker. She knows how to take care of her employees and get them whatever they want. She's got no particular knowledge of what Product should be. She just says whatever the CEOs want to hear.
Chief Growth Officer: Nothing to say about him really. He's just been promoted to lead this department, made up of Marketing (they fired the Chief Marketing Officer eight months after she began because they overspent for few results). He's young but not too overly confident, which is something you wouldn't expect when you first see him.
Chief Technical Officer: He's pretty good at managing through hard times. Otherwise too concerned about other departments' work. Had to merge Data and Technical roles because the other two interim CTOs they had were of no use.
Chief Science Officer: This was the greatest joke of all. They recruited this guy as a CTO before realising he was too self-absorbed to actually do anything productive. So they created this fictional job, Chief Science Officer, which allowed him to be paid heaps while spending his time attending conferences where he would speak of himself and how great he thinks he is.
Chief Banking Officer: He's probably very good. Hasn't been there for too long, but he's taken over some of the most complex themes.
