Pros
Middle management (direct team leads) display excellent leadership, good flexibility with home office during corona pandemic.
Kontras
I worked at the Berlin office (in the division Overtaal), and had a terrible experience here in terms of salary. I asked for a raise after two years of working there (in April 2019), and was told there was ‘not enough money’, while the company had some of its best performance to date, to apply the raise to my salary, but I would be given one-off bonuses to make up the difference, and the following year, the raise would be applied to my base salary. Obviously it's better to have the monthly salary increased, but I was patient. The next year (2020) comes, again there's 'not enough money' and the bonuses have to be applied again. In that same year, I was promoted to Associate Team Lead and started performing duties connected to that, and promised a second raise in connection with the promotion. This was in November 2020. Fast-forward to June of 2021, and I had still not received any increase to my salary - not even bonuses to make up the difference - for now two raises which should have been applied at the start of this year. I have been told every month of 2021 that the raises would come. I even received a signed letter from the HR department in April 2021, to say that the raises would be applied in May 2021, because I could not trust what management was telling me verbally, and the signed letter would make the agreement more formal and they would have to honour it, I thought. No such luck, no raises were applied in May, and when I spoke to the head of the Overtaal division about this to complain, they had not even read the letter and therefore did not know what they had reneged on, despite telling me they were very invested in my case. I have been repeatedly lied to, gaslit, and promised raises when the person promising them never had any intention of applying them. In corona times, this has meant a lot of additional stress about my future. All of this over just 6000 EUR a year (gross). The last thing I was told is that my direct manager is emailing the VP of the division every day to get his approval email - the 'last step', supposedly, in this saga - and he is simply not replying. Essentially: Higher management is happy to renege even on signed agreements by which they oblige themselves to finally, after 2 years, apply a small salary increase to one employee's salary; a small increase to the company, but an impactful increase for the employee, and do not care to know any further about the individual's circumstances and, apparently, cannot even muster the effort to reply to an email in order to improve those circumstances marginally. Atrociously incompetent, yes, but also quite malicious - this is how I've felt towards the end. I would advise no one to ever work here if you enjoy the luxuries of gainful employment, for example getting a raise after 4 years of working somewhere-4 years in which you have progressed massively in workload, and in how much you earn for the company, and have been promoted. I rate 'Karrierechancen' as 1 star also even though I felt the progression of the career path itself was well-structured: because this obviously needs to come along with a raise, and this was never given to me.
