Opiniones sobre N26

Ventajas

- Muchos ingenieros buenos. - Ambiente afable. - Presupuesto para autodesarrollo. - Tiempo libre para aprender o implementar proyectos propios. - Tentempiés y bebidas. - Comida los miércoles.

Desventajas

- Falta de gestión. - La cultura DevOps está presente, pero con muchos problemas heredados. - No se permite trabajar desde casa regularmente, pero a veces puedes hacerlo.

Ventajas

The purpose of the company is engaging. There is a lot of space to grow. We are open to use and try the new hot technologies. People are nice.

Desventajas

Hyper-growth sometimes overload the people that are already here and the on-boarding is not that structured (in a team level), because there is a lot of people coming in at the same time. There is not much diversity - neither black people, woman, LGBT... There are too many senior people - can be a con in discussions where people are passionate and not that flexible with other opinions. The carrear path is not... well structured.

Ventajas

A lot of talent and great people, nice company perks (fruits, coffee...), friendly environment, salary a bit above average. On the tech side they are really open, adopting latest tendencies and encouraging people to learn new things and share them in internal talks. There is a lot of room to learn if you look forward to.

Desventajas

Half of the expectations set when interviewing were not met (office was not kept in the city centre, a lot of legacy code, most of decisions still being taken completely in Berlin, impediments to WFH regularly...). From the organisational perspective, a lot of changes in the past months (groups/teams structure, ways of working, on call...) that give a significant sense of chaos (and not all of them can be... justified by hyper-growth). Many people that were there from the beginning left because of it.

Consejos para la Dirección

Company culture is not having pizza on Fridays. There needs to be more transparency, be more realistic with company objectives and not stress people out with tight deadlines.

Ventajas

The purpose of the company (breaking the personal banking industry) is meaningful. There are loads of smart people. The teams are truly cross-functional, and quite autonomous, especially in Barcelona. Salaries are above average for Barcelona. There now seems to be an effort from the top to tackle the growing pains (highlighted in the `Cons` section). The office in Barcelona is brand new, very nice, and in a... lovely area (Poblenou).

Desventajas

Successfully shifting from a small start-up build by passionate interns under the guidance of two founders to operating as a global-scale, innovative bank is the single biggest challenge that N26 is facing now: - The company has grown so fast that the processes have not kept up (or in some cases they don't exist yet). This is frustrating. Some information only exist in the brains of long-serving people, for... instance. - Some functions are still only in Berlin, and distance makes collaboration harder (thinking of critical ones like the regulated bank, legal, operations, etc. which are crucial for product management). Although it is easy to convince people to come to visit Barcelona for a few days, and some of these functions start to be hired locally as well. - Parts of the company culture are questionable and show that the top management still has trust issues (i.e., they need to learn to let go, N26 is not staffed with interns any more): - working from home is not really allowed (although in Barcelona we are more flexible and do it anyway, but it's not structured) - perks are below-par compared to other start-ups/tech companies in Barcelona (free lunch on Wednesdays only, no restaurant tickets - every perk there is is also offered by the other shiny start-ups in Barcelona, and then some) - the company all-hands is on Fridays at 6pm until 7pm with free pizza, feels like a mechanism to lure people to not leave early for the weekend (this does not prevent people to leave before in Barcelona)

Consejos para la Dirección

Continue to focus on structuring the company to allow people to do their best work. Trust that the people you hire will do their job. Don't be control freaks, you won't be able to anyway - N26 is too big and too distributed now.

Ventajas

Office dogs(until banned by the building owner in Barcelona), food on Wednesday and pizza on fridays

Desventajas

- Tight and unrealistic deadlines for features that dont really make sense, but C-level wants to implement - Most experienced people leaving, resulting in new people being in charge of taking desicions(like a new product owner having to commit to a Q3 planning on his first day) - Lack of key positions resulting in subpar people or others taking multiple roles - Management decisions usually have no explanation,... and go against the recommendation from Tech and Product - Rushing for new markets instead of adding new features, expanding current ones or implementing promises to customer - High reliance on manual processes with not enough time to implement them - No room to grow - Lack of help from the People team, specially in the Barcelona office where recruiters do most of the tasks as there is no people team - Lack of support for technical changes that would solve problems that cause frequent incidents - Pressure on working on new features as fast as possible without prioritizing other work that would make it easier or even give it for free, while cleaning up legacy code - Backend-centric, even not inviting frontend or mobile to key implementation desicions of going over what was decided previously with them - No clear carrer path, sometimes the feeling that your manager and manager's manager are working against you

Ventajas

High level of knowledge of the colleagues.

Desventajas

None at this moment in time.

Ventajas

Good environment in Barcelona, all the people hired there is quite good. Growing really fast and if you do a good job and you are proactive you can have good careers opportunities and grow. Fair salary and good work life balance

Desventajas

Quite some legacy and quality should improve. Would need more experienced people in some departments Due to the growth and legacy some teams are lagging behind and becoming really slow Barcelona still lack some benefits Random deadlines with bad plans in some cases

Consejos para la Dirección

Work on legacy and hire more experienced people in the teams that are lagging behind. Management should hear more, focus less on external image and work hard to fix the hyper growth issues. Move more part of the products to Barcelona as it proven a good place to hire tech position and build performing teams. Quality first.

Ventajas

Free fruits and drinks every day, free lunch on Wednesday’s

Desventajas

The worst part is that during the interview process they make you believe that you will be working with high quality and standards, the truth couldn’t be further than that, priorities constantly changing, large unaligned teams constantly shifting around, unclear goals. The mindset is to push out to production fast and low quality code full of bugs, that then is constantly being patched. For such a young company... there is already a lot of tech debt, never have I seen before such a mess and spaghetti code. Even new developments are quite messy, there is a huge lack of design and planning, One of the things I remember they asked me in the interview was “Do you know the difference between a programmer and a Software Engineer?” I ask the question back, Do you?

Consejos para la Dirección

Don’t lie to people during the interview process. Don’t advertise that the office is in city center, when really is a cowork space with an agenda to move later to a less accessible area. Do a better cultural fit process. A minimum of design and planning goes a long way. Give better feedback to employees, really make an effort on engineer management do not just assign this responsibility to the next guy with little... to none people skills