The company is bleeding money and has started layoffs, but they're smart enough to spread them over a few weeks rather than doing it all at once and ending up in the media. Smart, but vile at the same time. Micromanaging seems to be the preferred way of doing things at Stuart, but this clearly leads to nowhere, and restructuring the same departments over and over again month after month will never fix the leadership problems this company has. Some of the managers have been promoted to the position by simply being at the company long enough, and employees with decades of experience in their field who join Stuart end up leaving the company before their first year is complete. Salaries are average, or borderline on the low end. They try and gaslight you saying they hired a company to establish the salaries based on the market, but they don't tell you they picked the low range of the average and the company next door has a big chance of paying you at the very least 10/20% more for the same exact job. All the job offers I received after leaving Stuart were 20 to 45% more for exactly the same responsibilities, and it most definitely wasn't a few months at Stuart that made my profile so attractive to recruiters in other companies. Unfortunately, Stuart starts showing all the symptoms of a company that egregiously messed up their predictions for business growth post-pandemic: canceling company events because of lack of money, letting go of people in an effort to round up revenue at the end of quarters, changing the way retribution works so you won't get your bonus paid until the end of the working year, effectively making sure people don't get paid up to 10% extra unless they stay at the company for a whole extra year. On top of all the above, there's the moral question. You always need to decide whether it's worth working for a company that, at the end of the day, makes the core of its money from the disgusting gig economy that has proven time after time to be based on the sweat and pain of underpaid couriers, who are not protected enough, not paid enough, not listened to enough, and who constantly protest against Stuart and its millionnaire CEO demanding better conditions in face of all the changes that Stuart has introduced in the last years to reduce their obligations towards these people. If you are absolutely in need of a job and Stuart is the only option, take it but try to get out of there ASAP, so you can find a better job in a better company and also make sure Stuart needs to spend more money to replace you.
