Come! Join and spoil your career - Anonymous employee SD Squared Employee Review

Dear Fellow Colleague (I assume you are still working with us), Thank you for your feedback - I'm sure you have seen over the last couple of weeks I've been very very vocal about making sure we get feedback from everyone and in a way that allows us to question, understand and improve. This is a big step I hope you believe in trying to improve the overall culture and make us a fantastic place to work - it's my goal to make sure you are convinced. I do not for a second think we have every process buttoned down; we have been working to document, improve and streamline this to ensure that things either affect our team or our customers are robustly solved. I am surprised you mention that no-one wants to learn and grow - we run a masterclass frequently and those that want to learn and grow attend this. I think we can do a much better job at creating more peer to peer opportunities to learn as well as a formal learning program much like we did to train people in Excel, or to let them take English Classes in Office Hours so that they can better improve their communication. We have promoted young, aspiring and dedicated members of the team into positions that are probably above their current experience; but well within their punching range. It comes from a belief that they can do more; I definitely agree that we should be doing more to hand hold and train them. The average quality of our engineering has increased by an order of magnitude, if you think we are not hiring people because folks who are screening are threatened then you must let us know and we will make sure we bring all the stakeholders to the right place - that hiring people better than you is the best thing you can do for yourself. If anything in the last 4-5 months we have made massive strides in trying to makes people happy - more celebrations, more events and more cheer - I don't think we have nailed the perfect formula. But if you look at our Quarter on Quarter Attrition we have brought this down from 35% to 10% - that is now well below the average for any tech company. Similarly our YoY increments are higher this year than any year before; we've also capped the amount we pay new joining team members to be no more than 15/20%. Feedback system is being put in place - there is no "owner" but rather a management team and we welcome all the feedback that has steadily started coming - and we are rolling out 1:1 interviews with me next week, a private feedback loop so that you can reach out whenever you have a problem or a concern. I absolutely do not think anyone is a machine (maybe one person, that would be me) - maybe you've not noticed that I join 4am, 6am, 2am, 11pm calls on an almost regular basis and infact ensure calls are setup for everyone's convenience not just mine. As far as the new machine - I've got a 3 yr old Macbook I bought on Ebay - so clearly there is a little misunderstanding. The only thing new is a screen to plug it into! No-one is always on vacation - some of the senior team work whilst studying for exams and so they need to be in and out. Some are remote so they are not in the office and others have calls that are in the middle of the night. As you know we try to avoid a butt on seat culture - but we will be making active strides in the coming weeks to ensure create PAT - Predictability, Accountability and Transparency. Considering its anonymous and given that we have never paid anyone - we simply ask our teams to write what they think - if you notice even the good reviews - there is constructive feedback given in them. I'm sorry you feel like you are banging your head against the wall - I promise you that is not the intention - why not pop me an email - and let me know what we can do better and I'll get on to it. Sachin