Great place to start your career, terrible environment to work in
Pros
The business and market opportunities for the company are promising. It is definitely a great place to be in during the earlier parts of one's career. There are plenty of inflight opportunities, many of which are interesting. The company also offers great internal mobility opportunities. I myself have spent time in 4 different teams in my 3.5 years here. The culture is generally one that fosters creativity (think choice of tools used, types of analyses done) and the opportunity to speak up during meetings to share creative ideas, brainstorm with more senior people etc. Compensation (on paper) is top of the market, specifically in Berlin. The salary structure consists of a base, guaranteed 10 or 15% annual bonus (depending on your level, and a large proportion of the total compensation is stock based. I would also be remiss if I did not point out D&I initiatives and the fact that you can bring your own true self to work everyday.
Cons
Senior management is bloated with a full swath of management consultants, who have diluted the culture of the company. The company values are only on paper and are not followed in practice. Moreover, these consultants are typically not from a core e-commerce or Operations background, and therefore spend a ton of time creating meaningless presentations. Data driven decisions are supposed to be a part of the culture here, but it is truly not. Roughly 30-50% of one's time goes in to meetings, that could have very well been replaced by offline communication. This makes me wonder when people, especially as they get more senior, get any work done. This therefore creates a terrible work-life balance, especially for middle management because they have to manage teams, do the actual heavy lifting and bend to the whims and fancies of the senior management. There is no stability, and I have personally seen cases where people have had to change teams, or be part of periodic restructuring that ends up hurting their long term performance. Imagine having 3 or more different managers a year, and working on partial initiatives all throughout. Lastly, the performance appraisal is a terrible process. There is a lot of luck and personal clout involved, and often it seems like people who are a lot more vocal and have a larger network are preferred over actually letting the work speak for itself. There is severe attrition in the company. I have held jobs at different multiple companies of varying sizes and in different industries and I am sad to say that this career move was a mistake for me.
