NewStore Reviews

- 2020 was a tough year. Because of Corona, benefits like learning budget were cut, and people were openly displeased. Some of the best technical talents left. You can see other feedback in this page about that. - Mandatory on-call duty. All team members are expected to take part on it. - While it's a startup with < 200 people, it has too many hierarchy levels and internal politics, like a big company. You'll have to face a couple of entitled, status-seeking individuals who'll lick their way up in the internal food chain. - It markets as a product-based company, yet internally it feels like an agency or a sweatshop for developers. The product needs to be highly customized for each client, and they expect features to be instantly available, so that creates a high-pressure environment in the bottom line. - Internal productivity metrics promote unhealthy internal teams' competition. Teams are measured & compared internally mainly on how fast they deliver tickets. Such metrics are generally not transparent to developers, only shared between managers, and this creates an environment that almost feels like the famous Stanford Prison Experiment (Google it). Some team leads' attitudes (especially the high-performing ones) are creepy, yet validated by such metrics. - Micromanagement hell at scale supported by C-level and HR. Do you really believe a top-down weekly feedback cycle is healthy?

In 2020, NewStore went through a renewal of managers. This new management team lacks a lot in people skills and that makes things very complicated in the engineering department. Management started changing how the teams operate based on famous books like Accelerate and Inspired. Sounds like a good idea. These changes were announced as surprise parties. “Here are the new teams, effective next Monday”. Everybody likes a good surprise! This kind of "surprise" announcements were done several time because the information didn't trickle down correctly from the management team. What's more, around 10 people were also made redundant this year, even though the message in March was that we will not get rid of anyone. Most of the people that got fired were not even announced. It was “overlooked”. This complete lack of basic empathy and communication is something we’ve experienced so much this year that a lot of engineers have been resigning. After all the resignations, it seems the current attitude from management is to think “when we change the culture, people resign, that’s normal, change is hard”. It's easier to let people resign and start afresh if you do not want to improve on communication. It's also OK if you have a lot of cash to spend on renewing ppl and rebuild the knowledge... But... Didn't our bonus and other benefits get cut? I thought we were money-conscious? This is not logical at all. To help fix issues, management has created new company values like “presume good intentions”. Presuming good intentions is exactly what no one should do in a business relationship. I, as an employee, would rather be treated with respect: give me the data and I do the thinking for myself. I do not want to presume anything, especially if the company has been disrepectful recently. I wouldn’t recommend joining NewStore in its current state. Management needs to understand that they’re managing people and not numbers/resources.