This is where things start to change, over the couple of years I’ve worked at Xero, the last 6 months has seen a drastic change, many of these changes were before the “reset”, so I’ll try and avoid talking about reset. - Not everything aligns to our values any more, I personally don’t chase money I chase the culture, and that’s what brought me to Xero, so now I’m in a dilemma of so I stay and watch this unfold, or find somewhere else. - It’s a good job I don’t chase the money, they do not pay fairly AT ALL. If you join the company on a low salary you’ll stay low forever, and that’s me talking as a Team Lead. - Myself (and other Team Leads I speak to) have people in their team who earn far more money than they do, this seems quite unfair. - Promotions or Career Growth is difficult here, I haven’t had a single conversation with my manager in the couple of years I’ve been here. On numerous occasions I’ve interviewed people who are applying to Xero that previously worked at Xero already, and they left the company just so they can get promoted, then when they re-apply to Xero they have a better chance of getting a higher role… and it works! - The entire place is very political, there are hurdles everywhere you turn, it really slows down velocity, and if you can’t come to a solution about something (not in common) then it keeps elevating up the management / leadership ranks until it’s resolved. - Teams don’t really work with each other, they work against each other, a team will only care about what they are working on and nothing else. I have to speak to many different teams across the company and they are all the same, there’s no shared “Xero Vision”, where everybody is aligned, or where everybody wants to help anybody. - Your quality of work is not recognised, it’s about who shouts the loudest, or who calls-out their own achievements the loudest. - There has been a hiring freeze for many months now, which is understandable, however, some teams are crippled, some teams have far more engineers than they need, those teams struggling get no help, they have to continue, while those with more than they need just coast. - The atmosphere has changed drastically recently, as much as I said the office is beautiful, unfortunately the “air” in the place in now negative, and there’s less social activities, and the office has low capacity. - There are/was an absurd about of contractors here, these are very long term contractors who have been 1-2yrs, they are SUPER expensive, and yet, they get axed like pawns with little time to transfer crucial IP / context to actual employees, this is detrimental. - Some teams are high in demand (lots of other teams have dependencies on them), this results in the team making priority calls that push your work off their roadmap for the foreseeable, even though what you’re requesting from them directly relates to the company OKRs. - A number of the engineers in my team have older hardware, with build times taking 10 minutes, the company has put a freeze on all laptop changes, they have to make-do with what they have. - It’s not uncommon for leads (of any kind) to drastically over react to small issues, it’s almost like a peacock game where a small thing arises and everybody starts scrambling to show off who is the best lead… it could be the TINIEST of things, to me it just wastes time. - Despite losing a large percentage of my team due to contractor cuts (and the other teams on my product too), the demand hasn’t reduced, it’s almost as if company / Product don’t understand less capacity mean’s less output. - The Team Lead Engineering role seems very different from one team to the next, some are reporting hands on, some are reporting no hands on at all, some have lots of management responsibilities, others do not, it’s weird, yet they all have the same job description.
