Good compensation and benefits, but a highly control-driven culture with limited autonomy and growth
Pros
Competitive salary and overall compensation. Strong benefits package, both in terms of financial savings and well-being. The company had an excellent performance coach who genuinely cared about people and actively tried to create safe spaces for open conversations. The people (not the management or their family in Lisbon).
Cons
The company strongly promoted remote work, then abruptly shifted to hybrid, and eventually to fully on-site work. While a change in strategy is legitimate, the transition was handled with very low transparency and no meaningful communication. The office culture is heavily control-oriented. Office management is handled by the CEO’s close family (sister and parents), which creates an environment where employees often feel monitored and observed rather than trusted. This makes it difficult to feel psychologically safe at work. There is no real strategic thinking. Most decisions are pure execution of ideas coming directly from the CEO or from ChatGPT outputs, regardless of domain expertise. Even with significant experience in a specific area, final decisions are consistently made by people without that expertise. Ownership is essentially non-existent. Initiating new projects, improving processes, or proposing new ideas is not encouraged and, in practice, not possible. Professional growth is not supported. There is no real investment in training or learning. The culture is focused on constant execution and firefighting, leaving no room to learn, experiment, or implement new approaches. The performance coach role, despite being filled by a highly capable professional, had no real power to drive change. Her responsibility was to keep people motivated and emotionally supported, but she had no authority to alter processes, influence decisions, or introduce meaningful improvements. This pattern applied to many other roles as well. HR lacks vision and autonomy. The function is purely operational and defensive, clearly prioritizing company protection over employee well-being or development. The operations manager is overly focused on micro-control, such as tracking how long employees spend in the kitchen, having coffee, or using their phones, instead of focusing on actual operational improvements or enabling teams to perform better.
