Remote is not a company for ambitious people who are looking to grow in their careers or earn competitive salaries. And unfortunately, it doesn’t compensate for that with culture. The talk about company values is all just talk. On many teams the culture is abusive and that comes from the top down. The founders have built a culture of fear and use it as a motivator. They don’t care about employees and just want to get max productivity for the lowest possible cost.
Here are things I have seen happening at Remote….
Employees will work hard for promotions for years. But promotions are promised just to get employees to overwork and jump through hoops, it either never happens or takes much longer than promised. If an employee finally gets an offer for promotion it sometimes wont even include any pay increase, or it is an increase so small it’s only a cost of living raise. This is common and many long-time employees have been offered promotions without increased compensation, as if they should just be happy to take on more work for nothing.
Pay bands have been reset multiple times as one way to deny employee raises.
Sometimes, performance reviews are used as tools to keep employees in their place, not as accurate reflections of performance.
There are very rigid paths for advancement and once you’re in a role you’re usually pigeonholed there (on most teams). If you’re hired as a junior or mid level IC, it could take years to even advance one level and become a senior IC and then longer to jump through hoops to become a manager, then senior manager, then maybe director, and that rarely happens because if you’re hired as an IC you’re basically stuck there. Usually, the company would rather hire externally instead of promote ICs to management roles. But if you are hired as director or above, there are more opportunities for advancement (it’s pretty common for directors and above to get quick promotions). This all does vary depending on your team, there are more advancement opportunities in certain teams.
Senior leadership roles, unfortunately, are very toxic in the company because the co-founders will often fire senior leaders dramatically to make them scapegoats for problems, after burning them out or not listening to their advice and not giving them enough autonomy to be effective at their jobs.
If you’re in a high cost country:
Applications from candidates in higher cost countries are frequently rejected outright, even though the company claims it will hire from anywhere. If they are a referral, candidates in high cost markets might get an interview but will get pushed out of the process for arbitrary reasons after their time has been wasted. Early on, the company’s policy on pay (which they marketed aggressively) was that no one in any country should be making less than $40000 annually. The founders removed that policy and since then are looking to hire more people at sub $35000 salaries. Managers are actually encouraged to prioritize hiring candidates from lower cost markets.
Some upper management have openly said “I can get 2-4 employees for the cost of 1 by hiring in this country instead” and that they won’t hire in places like U.S. cities except for special cases. The “diversity” the company brags about is mostly because they want to hire in low cost markets like LATAM to save on budget sheets.
Managers will try to push out employees who don’t seem obsessed enough with the company and mission.
There is a blame culture when things go wrong. ICs and lower level employees are frequently made to be fall people for upper or middle management mistakes.
Priorities are constantly shifted.
Almost every day feels like a fire drill.
PTO time is often disrespected, many managers will ask employees to still do work or be online on their days off or their public holidays.
The sales team is constantly changing with new leadership and goals that are unrealistic. And with so many competitors it’s harder and harder to sell, but leadership doesn’t seem to care about the reality of the market when creating their expectations. Sales team members say they are not listened to or cared about. One of the co-founders placed himself as CRO after the old CRO left and it created chaos throughout the entire organization. That chaos and uneasiness is still felt in every team. The other co-founder has also taken the task of managing teams that he’s not qualified to lead, because they aren’t able to have successful long term relationships with the executive team members they hire.
Product and engineering teams are frequently working weekends just to keep up and to meet impossible deadlines.
Engineers without good social skills or leadership ability are given management roles for unknown reasons. Many Eng managers are not able to even create agendas or lead a meeting. Engineering and product teams suffer from a lack of competent leadership and there are constant team changes on top of the constantly shifting priorities, which make the job much more stressful than it should be. Such things are common on other teams as well.
In the product teams there is too much of a focus on building more and more instead of focusing on doing things well. Technical debt is huge.
Teams all feel very understaffed despite the company having over 1000 employees. Managers are always complaining that they don’t have enough staff or budget or resources for projects.
Many employees privately say they feel they are working the jobs of 2 to 3 people and even that it has affected their health. If you start overworking, it becomes what’s expected of you and you are rarely rewarded for it.
Managers will promise team members they will hire more staff to take the pressure off, but the hiring process is very long on many teams for getting approval for the role, then all the interviews (interview process can take a month or longer) and frequently candidates will reject offers in the last stage and so they will have to start over, because the compensation isn’t great or the interview process was such a mess that the candidate was no longer interested or found something else. It can sometimes take six months, a year, or longer for new team members to finally be hired after it has been promised. And then there is a pretty high churn rate on some teams which makes them constantly scrambling to hire and keep up with the expectations that keep on growing. Especially on operational and support teams where the average pay is low, employees do not have enough incentive to stay once they find they are being mistreated. This also has an effect on other teams who rely on their internal partnership to build and ship things.
The company struggles to find and keep great talent, and when they do have excellent people they burn them out so they become less effective or stop caring about their work, which makes things harder on the entire team.
Many teams are working on different versions of the same things, trying to solve the same problem in different ways, and there’s no real leadership coming in to make a decision on which approach is best and what team should be leading what (the founders are micromanagers until they are actually needed, then they often step back to let teams figure it out between themselves). Therefore no progress is made, or it takes a year or longer to see progress. Just a lot of endless bickering across teams and internal drama.
There are so many bureaucratic processes internally that it takes way too long for anything to happen, or things will just never happen.
Core company values have been changing constantly for years based on the whims of the founders, and this is destabilizing for employees.
In APAC, employees are basically forced to stay online late into the night to work with others in Europe and Americas or be on calls, even though the company claims to be fully async. There is a lot of pressure to be online at certain times, even though it goes against the values the company brags about all over social media and in their handbook. A c-level in APAC left the company because of this and the impact the work hours was having on his family. And in americas, some employees are waking up at 4-5am for calls on a regular basis.
Privately, many long-time employees will tell you they are looking for other jobs and want to leave but are afraid to quit because of the economy. Some are also fearful they could lose their jobs any day because things are so unpredictable in the organization. It does not create a healthy productive work environment.
I think that there is a hope from many people in the company to change these cultural issues, and some progress has been made this year but really not close to enough. There are some great and kind managers working to solve things but it is an uphill battle. The most they can do is just try to protect their own team members as much as they can. It is sad when managers feel like they have to protect people that work under them because of all the politics and toxic behavior from above. It seems the company is too big and disorganized to course correct now, and the founders and executives do not have what it takes to set things right.
If you just want to be able to work remotely and that is your only concern, then maybe Remote is for you. Yes you can go to a doctor appointment or run errands in the day and work where you want, as this seems to be their biggest selling point as a company. If you’re in EMEA your experience will possibly be better than others because you can at least have more normal work hours.
If you care about career opportunities and your wellness, I would look elsewhere.
And maybe see the 5 star reviews here barely have any feedback while the negative reviews have a lot of real insight to share.
