Mass layoffs overshadowed potential and hardworking team dynamics
Pros
The company had real potential, good product, a hardworking ground-level team, and a business model worth believing in. I genuinely gave everything I had here, working beyond hours, handling queries around the clock, never turning down a task. That dedication existed across the team, and it deserves to be acknowledged.
Cons
I was part of a sudden mass layoff here, and what I witnessed leading up to it and during it is something people considering this company deserve to know. The HR function, which should be the backbone of any people-first organization, has become its biggest liability. A bloated HR team with multiple HRBPs, a large TA function, and several others; and yet the output in terms of fair, ethical people practices is close to zero. The structural problem is this: the CHRO is not actually running HR. Real decision-making has quietly shifted to one individual, an HRBP lead, who effectively calls the shots and communicates decisions upward for endorsement. The CHRO simply follows. When the most senior HR voice in the room isn’t the one setting direction, the entire function loses accountability. The double standards are impossible to overlook. Certain people within the HR team can adjust their own attendance records, take extended bereavement leaves without question, and face zero scrutiny; while the same flexibility is flatly denied to others, with salary deductions enforced without exception. When the people managing the policies are also the ones exempt from them, it stops being a grey area. It becomes a clear conflict of interest. There’s also a senior HR individual who was reportedly part of layoffs at his previous organisation, yet here he draws a heavy salary, contributes little of visible substance, speaks rudely to people, and carries himself as though he’s the most informed person. That kind of leadership, loud, dismissive, and unaccountable sets the tone for everything below it. And then came the day I was let go. No prior communication. No notice. No conversation. A group of us, people who had worked nights, managed merchant’s crises, delivered results, and never said no to anything, were out in a single day. It wasn’t restructuring with empathy. It was bulk firing executed without an ounce of dignity or respect for the time we had given. What stings the most is knowing that many of us, and others before us, had written directly to the founders raising these concerns. It went nowhere. Either those voices never reached the top, or they were filtered out somewhere along the way — which says something in itself. Meanwhile, the same HR team that orchestrated this remains untouched. That’s the part that’s hardest to make peace with.
