There is a high degree of nepotism. The company was founded by a group of friends, who are all now C-Level. Some of them remain fair, but some promote their friends and incompetent middle managers.
The HR system itself does not work. You are assigned a PSM (people success manager) who will help you with your career, problems and so on. Which sounds great... except that they do nothing. Literaly nothing. I have had multiple problems with my subordinates. None got solved. Especially in the EMEA region, the PSMs are useless. Which does not stop them from being promoted.
Following up on this last point, OutSystems has been participating in a large-scale cover up of their HR failures in the Portuguese press. They are praised for hiring people during the COVID crisis, when in reality they are only making up for the people they are firing in droves. They pay a ridiculous amount of money (one year's pay) to fire anybody they want under any circumstance (they don't tell the public this, though. Curious).
They also have a performance tracking system, OutPerform. Which is supposedly a "next-level platform" for managing reviews and progression. This is also a sham. I have been since its inception three years ago. This system has not been used once for a promotion or gathering of feedback. None of the members of its original team remain in the company (it's still promoted to the press as something unique and amazing).
This company was good in the beginning, but the culture changed. People that screwed over colleagues were not tolerated, but they started being accepted, and rose through the ranks. Right now, if you are hired by OutSystems, you can expect a "russian rolette career". Being promoted and obtaining bonuses will depend on your friends and not your skills.
Unless you go to the HR department. In that case, based on all my experiences, you can literally do nothing and rise to the top.
