Why would anyone work for a company like this? You startup folk are much better than this! Thankfully this person pushed back.
Why would you ever put up with something like this? I would laugh at the recruiter or manager if I was asked to do something like this. It’s akin to that door to door knife company that takes advantage of college kids.
There was a wired article in the twitter link you provided.
>She did a 30-minute job interview over Google Hangouts with the London-based head of business development, Andrius Biceika, and was immediately told she had passed to the next round, which would involve a small test. “The surprise came when I received the task and it asked me to get the company as many clients as possible, with each one depositing €10 into the app,” says Laura.
The instructions on the exercise said the applicants should recruit at least 200 clients in a week to have a chance at passing to the next interview phase. The task’s description didn’t guarantee that reaching the target would automatically qualify applicants for a job, but did advise them on a number of ways they could get clients, such as sharing a “promo code” with their friends, sharing it on social media, and posting promotional flyers on university campuses.
After Laura wrote back refusing to do the task and saying she was disappointed that the company would “take advantage of someone that is looking for a job”, Biceika emailed her saying she was the only candidate out of over 350 that had complained about the task. “Apologies you're not up to show what you're capable of,” he wrote in the email.
They kind of are getting compensated (the job offer), I think the issue is if the applicant didn't divulge to their 'friends' that they were getting a job on the back of it. Not sure if applicants would be classed as employees in this context though.
It is completely legal in the UK without any compensation. I saw companies adding clauses in their contract of 'and you agree to work overtime without any pay' by default and claiming 'it is our standard template, no one complained before you' when confronted about it. Once you agree to such contract, they pretty much own your time.
I've got one of those. The one time it's come up, in relation to out-of-hours support, I made it clear that there are plenty of other jobs. So the arrangement is that I agree to do any overtime that the company requires, free of charge, providing they don't ask me to do any. In the meantime, if there's an emergency I'll do my best. And we get along quite nicely.
> It is completely legal in the UK without any compensation.
This isn't strictly true.
The Working Time Directive provides you the right to work no more than 48 hours a week.
It is possible in the UK to opt out of the Working Time Directive, but it is not mandatory. You cannot be forced to do so.
So whilst a UK company can legally add a clause that says "you agree to work overtime without any pay", they cannot force you to work that overtime unless you have agreed to opt-out. A company that doesn't hire you because you refuse to opt-out is breaking the law.
>> A company that doesn't hire you because you refuse to opt-out is breaking the law.
I'm nearly certain you are wrong on this point. A company definitely cannot fire you or mistreat you for not agreeing to the clause, but there's literally nothing in that page that you sent that would say it's illegal to not hire somebody just because they don't agree to the opt out.
She wasn't the only one. I'd guess more than half of them will not have done the task. Saying "you were the only one not doing it" is a way to lure her into eventually doing the task even though she initially decided against it by building up "imaginary peer pressure". And even better: if she has second thoughts and decides to do it, she just gave them a nice argumentative path to "decide" against her later anyway - after all, she did hesitate at first "to fully live up to her potential"...
"They are telling this of Lord Beaverbrook and a visiting Yankee actress. In a game of hypothetical questions, Beaverbrook asked the lady: ‘Would you live with a stranger if he paid you one million pounds?’ She said she would. ‘And if be paid you five pounds?’ The irate lady fumed: ‘Five pounds. What do you think I am?’ Beaverbrook replied: ‘We’ve already established that. Now we are trying to determine the degree."
Wow... I'm genuinely shocked at the at the 27 GET IT DONE clicks. I mean this probably worked for that one weekend and until people got their bonus, but I bet you the moment the people had their bonus they would leave. It's a good sprint strategy but costs you talent and talent hiring in the long run.
In many companies, executive management puts more trust in the HR management than other sectors of the org. I speculate it’s for a number of reasons: HR is often the most easily subverted department, needing far less objectivity than departments related to brass tacks product development, IT, customer service, etc. So HR can most easily be a yes-man that executives like to hear from. Also while there certainly are domain-specific properties of HR work that require training and experience, there are also relatively more things handled in HR that are understandable to a layperson with no specialized knowledge in that space, perhaps inviting executives to feel like they are contributing more directly when engaging with HR.
Whatever the causes might be, one big effect is that HR usually gets to spin stories about turnover and recruiting to create perceptions such as
- nobody could possibly have done anything to prevent a critical employee from leaving
- despite some critical person leaving, nobody did anything wrong and if they hired the same person again they should handle everything the same way.
- there are just not enough candidates (to disguise the real issue that compensation and benefits are not competitive)
- the employee we need has to be open-minded, but we’re only seeing dogmatic people in the pipeline and/or the ubiquitous “not a good culture fit” feedback, to disguise the problem that the company itself is dogmatic and closed-minded, and candidates react to perceived dogmatic culture by turning down interviews or offers.
And many more.
In other words, HR will spin the situation to say that no productivity is lost to turnover, that nothing could have been done to maintain that productivity, and that whatever happens is never due to misaligned compensation or management failures, it’s just an unchangeable cost of doing business.
To be honest the banking industry has a very long history of building superb, over-engineered systems that are meant to sustain a nuclear strike, though in practice are down once a week, delivered 5 years late, and never fit for purpose.
Should there be some kind of “shit list” or “toxic list” for tech companies? Admittedly, public shaming & blaming is tricky if you don’t know the context, and faking a Slack screenshot is trivial (not saying the one here is fake).
I guess Glassdoor is as close as it gets now, together with leaks on Twitter posted by the parent.
One of the problems with Glassdoor is availability bias - it selects in the people who have been around at companies like this for a while and/or thrive in this kind of culture and selects out people who take one look at a company culture like this and leave within a week.
"The instructions on the exercise said the applicants should recruit at least 200 clients in a week to have a chance at passing to the next interview phase."
Damn... very disapointing considering how cool their product is. Monzo is better anyway, and the best bank app on the market, and I’ve heard it’s a cool place to work at. Just wish they would be faster to come to the US.
I really don't see a problem with this. It's not the "working on weekends" that's the issue, it's KPIs. If you promise something, deliver it. If you don't think you can, don't promise it!
This assumes the KPIs were created and "promised" by those responsible for them rather than handed down from above. Which seems unlikely given everything else I've read about this company.
But who is promising it? It's not like the individuals that work in the teams tasked to work on the weekends is the same individuals that promise these KPI-numbers?
Even so, can you really claim that they are not pushed towards nearly impossible goals? It's very common to not reach a goal for a gazillion of reasons, forcing people to work weekends while you yourself get all the money from it is being an asshat.
There's a breed of execs out there that go: "Bring [metric] [up|down] [X%] by next [quarter|year]" without the slightest notion of if/how it could get done. And a number of them don't take any variation of "we need to negotiate that" for an answer.
If the CEO sets the KPI, and the KPI is not achieveable, does that mean he should fire himself for not meeting expectations? He failed at his job, after all.
Why would anyone work for a company like this? You startup folk are much better than this! Thankfully this person pushed back.
Why would you ever put up with something like this? I would laugh at the recruiter or manager if I was asked to do something like this. It’s akin to that door to door knife company that takes advantage of college kids.
There was a wired article in the twitter link you provided.
>She did a 30-minute job interview over Google Hangouts with the London-based head of business development, Andrius Biceika, and was immediately told she had passed to the next round, which would involve a small test. “The surprise came when I received the task and it asked me to get the company as many clients as possible, with each one depositing €10 into the app,” says Laura.
The instructions on the exercise said the applicants should recruit at least 200 clients in a week to have a chance at passing to the next interview phase. The task’s description didn’t guarantee that reaching the target would automatically qualify applicants for a job, but did advise them on a number of ways they could get clients, such as sharing a “promo code” with their friends, sharing it on social media, and posting promotional flyers on university campuses.
After Laura wrote back refusing to do the task and saying she was disappointed that the company would “take advantage of someone that is looking for a job”, Biceika emailed her saying she was the only candidate out of over 350 that had complained about the task. “Apologies you're not up to show what you're capable of,” he wrote in the email.
What the hell, is that even legal?
It is, if you agree to do it. In current version of capitalism, person applying for a job has almost no rights except perhaps GDPR.
Isn't that illegal in the UK without compensation?
They kind of are getting compensated (the job offer), I think the issue is if the applicant didn't divulge to their 'friends' that they were getting a job on the back of it. Not sure if applicants would be classed as employees in this context though.
It is completely legal in the UK without any compensation. I saw companies adding clauses in their contract of 'and you agree to work overtime without any pay' by default and claiming 'it is our standard template, no one complained before you' when confronted about it. Once you agree to such contract, they pretty much own your time.
I've got one of those. The one time it's come up, in relation to out-of-hours support, I made it clear that there are plenty of other jobs. So the arrangement is that I agree to do any overtime that the company requires, free of charge, providing they don't ask me to do any. In the meantime, if there's an emergency I'll do my best. And we get along quite nicely.
> It is completely legal in the UK without any compensation.
This isn't strictly true.
The Working Time Directive provides you the right to work no more than 48 hours a week.
It is possible in the UK to opt out of the Working Time Directive, but it is not mandatory. You cannot be forced to do so.
So whilst a UK company can legally add a clause that says "you agree to work overtime without any pay", they cannot force you to work that overtime unless you have agreed to opt-out. A company that doesn't hire you because you refuse to opt-out is breaking the law.
https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours
> A company that doesn't hire you because you refuse to opt-out is breaking the law.
Unless the company does something bafflingly stupid, though, there's likely no way to prove that's what happened.
>> A company that doesn't hire you because you refuse to opt-out is breaking the law.
I'm nearly certain you are wrong on this point. A company definitely cannot fire you or mistreat you for not agreeing to the clause, but there's literally nothing in that page that you sent that would say it's illegal to not hire somebody just because they don't agree to the opt out.
Guess what, opting out is there 'by default' too.
> “Apologies you're not up to show what you're capable of,” he wrote in the email.
It sounds like Laura showed what's she's capable of: standing up to abusive employers. It's a shame she was the only one.
She probably wasn't the only one, either. Con artists lie about everything.
She wasn't the only one. I'd guess more than half of them will not have done the task. Saying "you were the only one not doing it" is a way to lure her into eventually doing the task even though she initially decided against it by building up "imaginary peer pressure". And even better: if she has second thoughts and decides to do it, she just gave them a nice argumentative path to "decide" against her later anyway - after all, she did hesitate at first "to fully live up to her potential"...
>Why would anyone work for a company like this?
For a sufficient amount of money I would do it. But it would be a LOT.
"They are telling this of Lord Beaverbrook and a visiting Yankee actress. In a game of hypothetical questions, Beaverbrook asked the lady: ‘Would you live with a stranger if he paid you one million pounds?’ She said she would. ‘And if be paid you five pounds?’ The irate lady fumed: ‘Five pounds. What do you think I am?’ Beaverbrook replied: ‘We’ve already established that. Now we are trying to determine the degree."
Wow... I'm genuinely shocked at the at the 27 GET IT DONE clicks. I mean this probably worked for that one weekend and until people got their bonus, but I bet you the moment the people had their bonus they would leave. It's a good sprint strategy but costs you talent and talent hiring in the long run.
Spot on! How much productivity is lost due to turnover and re-hiring?
“Doesn’t matter those people weren’t committed enough so we’re better off without them.” Yes, some people actually use that justification.
What worries me is that in some cases it takes years until something makes them see how ridiculous of a conclusion this is.
Or even worse: sometimes that doesn't happen at all.
In many companies, executive management puts more trust in the HR management than other sectors of the org. I speculate it’s for a number of reasons: HR is often the most easily subverted department, needing far less objectivity than departments related to brass tacks product development, IT, customer service, etc. So HR can most easily be a yes-man that executives like to hear from. Also while there certainly are domain-specific properties of HR work that require training and experience, there are also relatively more things handled in HR that are understandable to a layperson with no specialized knowledge in that space, perhaps inviting executives to feel like they are contributing more directly when engaging with HR.
Whatever the causes might be, one big effect is that HR usually gets to spin stories about turnover and recruiting to create perceptions such as
- nobody could possibly have done anything to prevent a critical employee from leaving
- despite some critical person leaving, nobody did anything wrong and if they hired the same person again they should handle everything the same way.
- there are just not enough candidates (to disguise the real issue that compensation and benefits are not competitive)
- the employee we need has to be open-minded, but we’re only seeing dogmatic people in the pipeline and/or the ubiquitous “not a good culture fit” feedback, to disguise the problem that the company itself is dogmatic and closed-minded, and candidates react to perceived dogmatic culture by turning down interviews or offers.
And many more.
In other words, HR will spin the situation to say that no productivity is lost to turnover, that nothing could have been done to maintain that productivity, and that whatever happens is never due to misaligned compensation or management failures, it’s just an unchangeable cost of doing business.
I suspect you're right. Sadly.
If you look more carefully, the icon actually says "GET SH*T DONE". Somehow a little more apt given the current headlines.
"GET SHIT DONE" has been their company mantra for years. They have it on their office walls.
To be honest the banking industry has a very long history of building superb, over-engineered systems that are meant to sustain a nuclear strike, though in practice are down once a week, delivered 5 years late, and never fit for purpose.
Should there be some kind of “shit list” or “toxic list” for tech companies? Admittedly, public shaming & blaming is tricky if you don’t know the context, and faking a Slack screenshot is trivial (not saying the one here is fake).
I guess Glassdoor is as close as it gets now, together with leaks on Twitter posted by the parent.
Revolut FYI has a 4.2 rating on Glassdoor.
One of the problems with Glassdoor is availability bias - it selects in the people who have been around at companies like this for a while and/or thrive in this kind of culture and selects out people who take one look at a company culture like this and leave within a week.
There used to be a thing called "Fucked Company" - ran by a guy named Pud..
Seems a pretty toxic place to work [1]. And toxic recruitment policy of requiring them to acquire 200 customers as part of the recruitment process.
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour-...
"The instructions on the exercise said the applicants should recruit at least 200 clients in a week to have a chance at passing to the next interview phase."
Wow, disgusting.
Damn... very disapointing considering how cool their product is. Monzo is better anyway, and the best bank app on the market, and I’ve heard it’s a cool place to work at. Just wish they would be faster to come to the US.
To be fair you have Simple Bank and Qapital in the US if you're looking for Monzolikes
They are only for UScitizens. Not for other permanent residents. They are nothing to compare with Monzo either.
Wow, don't expect any revolutionary products out of a company with such a hostile working environment.
I also completely lost any trust that this company can safely deal with my money and private data securely.
Absolutely disgusting.
Their product is pretty revolutionnary. Monzo is way better though.
I honestly love Revolut’s product (never tried Monzo bc I’m not UK based).
Shithole move, I would rather live in the a shed in the woods than work for a person like that. I would make it official on the slack as well.
he 's just trying to fit in to the whole "finance" ecosystem
I thought that was more about snorting cocaine off the backside of a stripper.
It looks like a managing politics seems very similar to the gulag in XX century. East Europe people have often tendencies to manage that way.
This kind of bullshit goes hand in hand with current interview practices. I am done with this.
I really don't see a problem with this. It's not the "working on weekends" that's the issue, it's KPIs. If you promise something, deliver it. If you don't think you can, don't promise it!
In an ideal world where all facts are known before hand, yes. In a fast moving startup with toxic management? Good luck.
This assumes the KPIs were created and "promised" by those responsible for them rather than handed down from above. Which seems unlikely given everything else I've read about this company.
But who is promising it? It's not like the individuals that work in the teams tasked to work on the weekends is the same individuals that promise these KPI-numbers?
Even so, can you really claim that they are not pushed towards nearly impossible goals? It's very common to not reach a goal for a gazillion of reasons, forcing people to work weekends while you yourself get all the money from it is being an asshat.
KPIs are an ultimatum not a promise.
Who gets to set their own KPIs? I've never known a company where this is the case.
There's a breed of execs out there that go: "Bring [metric] [up|down] [X%] by next [quarter|year]" without the slightest notion of if/how it could get done. And a number of them don't take any variation of "we need to negotiate that" for an answer.
If the CEO sets the KPI, and the KPI is not achieveable, does that mean he should fire himself for not meeting expectations? He failed at his job, after all.
Ideally, employees/managers would push back when KPIs are set
How do you imagine that push back would be taken given what we know about this company?