Great colleagues but leadership out of touch - Machine Learning Applications Engineer Neural Concept Employee Review

The learning rate is outstanding, both in a general work framework, in an engineering domain or in the AI for engineering domain. Strong belief that Neural Concept is having a great positive impact on the world, the projects are meaningful. High level of integrity in the technical teams as well as the interactions with the customers. Agree with a previous review stating the impact that integrity has on success of Neural Concept. Extremely talented colleagues and the opportunity to learn from them.

Some deadlines can be intense - but that might be linked to the opportunity for growth. Some HR topics can take a long time to be solved. We are working on such cool topics, it would be great to be able to publicly communicate more on those topics. I feel the public reputation of the company could benefit a lot from it.

1 - Great learning experience 2 - Great tech 3 - Incredibly capable and helpful teammates 4 - Uncommon levels of intellectual honesty in general and especially towards the potential applications of "AI" in engineering, even among management (at least the ones that used to be AEs). Because of this, people are able to take decisions in an effective manner and deliver actual, innovative value in production. Factor 4 is responsible for 99% of the company's success.

The company markets itself as a high-trust, transparent environment. My experience did not match this. - When I resigned, I was asked to delay my resignation by one day while management explored an internal opportunity. The next day I was told the opportunity did not exist. This added a full month to my notice period. - Exercising my ESOP was a contentious multi-month process. I was given inconsistent information in what I cannot describe as anything but an attempt to make me miss deadlines, pressured, initially told I could not exercise options at all based on a clause a lawyer later flagged as unenforceable under Swiss law (the fact I had left of my own volition), then confronted with the prospect of legal action. I am aware of other former employees who described similar experiences, I was one of the very few who was actually able to exercise their ESOP. - References given by two senior colleagues to a prospective employer resulted in a rescinded offer after a successful 5+ stage interview process. - Abysmal software engineering practices relative to the quality of the ML/DS work. The entire software used to be a CLI tool and it lacked CI for approximately three years. Advice to management: Align the offboarding experience with the values stated during recruitment and employment.