Vainu Reviews

Has a lot of horrible characters running the business. Hired a HR for just hiring and having exit discussions, atmosphere was horrible and people were being bullied left, right and centre. Never have I seen anywhere so many people getting burnouts.

When a tech company wants a new product it needs planning. It needs a vision of what the end product is. It needs a strategy of how to get to the point where the product creates value. It needs some form of a team to gather around and plan how the vision and the strategy is turned into a working system which solves problems. None of that happens in Vainu. There is absolutely zero software engineering. No meetups, no strategy, no coherent and concrete vision. There won't be any kind of planning with your team because you will never have any kind of group project. What you will have is a task allocation where you are given a task. That's it. That's all the planning there is. You're given a task in a 10-15 minute meeting and that is all the planning, design and strategy you'll ever have with the management. The management doesn't give any realistic, concrete and coherent software engineering goals. What they give is extraordinarily vague visions of what their dream product is. You're just given a task without design and that's it. They tell you to do it somehow without telling how, but 99 % of the time you work completely alone without any support from team members because you won't have a team working on same project. Your colleagues are already in the same situation as you are so it's impossible to ask for relevant support or allocate tasks. The idea that some group of developers could plan a complete system to solve these problems is not the Vainu way. The essence of Vainu engineering is not to create solutions or systems to solve problems. What you do is write scripts for features without a team to work with you. All the responsibility is on you and asking for help isn't "Could you do this part of the project while I do this?" because you won't have any colleagues working with you in the same project the same as you are. What you do have is extremely helpful colleagues who do their best to help you with your problems but not working on the same problems as you do because they also have their hands full. In reality this means that Vainu has a developer shortage because even if the management would want to plan working systems they wouldn't have enough developers. Now they ask for some extreme features like everyone in the industry but they don't give the resources to do so. Because there is no clear vision there is no tangible goal which can be used as a target for planning a development strategy which would be used to create a system with a team of developers. All this creates a downwards spiral where one thing leads to another and none of the core issues in software engineering are addressed because the most basic level of design and planning with a team to work on the system is nonexistent at Vainu. Now because the management doesn't give any project management there is no clean vision of the end product which means that there can be no software engineering strategy which means that there is no technical design which means that there is no team to work on it. That leaves you working with a managerial vision that doesn't give you a clear problem to solve because the management never defined the problem! These vague ideas are something you need to work on all the time. It needs to be understood that software engineering management is hard. Managing a software project is as much an art as it is a science. Making new technologies requires experience and well, in my experience every project fails. Management also fails because that's just the nature of it and it's by no means Vainu specific phenomenon. For example the programmer is working on the project full time but manager isn't. There has to be forgiveness and initiative to take responsibility even if management isn't up to task 100 % of the time. Everyone has their role in the process which is why communication and trust are how developers can help the managers to succeed so the managers can help developers succeed. But there is a clear line between incompetent managers and harmful managers. With experience the incompetent can learn to be better. But being harmful manager is being aggressive and creating an environment that is hostile. This time I'm not talking about software engineering project management but concrete leadership skills. In Vainu the biggest sin is to say anything critical or to criticize the product in any way. The outcome is not vague words of "We'll see, thank you bringing this to my attention." What happens is that the management will attack you. These attacks go to you as a person. Vainu management has public shaming sessions where they shame employees who had left but who disagreed with the management. Usually the employees have left on their own volition or were fired but management has gathered all the developers together and said how "The employee X had a bad attitude which we don't need here." At times why someone has been fired was said out loud in the same public shaming style where the management said that "Employee Y was not senior enough." Why hire someone at all if you don't want to help them learn the skills? Why they want to create this atmosphere of fear I don't know but for sure public shaming is plain wrong and not professional by any means. Nevertheless that has happened at Vainu. If you do get into a Vainu interview remember to ask about these public shaming sessions they've been having. The culture wont change unless the change is forced.