TL:DR
- Constant feeling of unsafety because of layoffs and in many cases ignoring contract.
- Zero respect for workforce.
- No communication and transparency.
- Exploiting people from countries with less opportunities.
- A ton of senior people started leaving 2 years ago and they keep leaving from times to times.
> You may have signed a contract, but they may change something if they want to. Examples that this occurs:
"You signed to go 2/5 times in the office, but suddenly you need to go 5/5." "You signed to be based in Seville, but they over hired.. so, Seville office is full and you have to go to Madrid."
"You signed to travel to Seville (and you booked airplane tickets), but they need you to go 1 month earlier than they said to you initially."
The list goes on to be honest and I am not exaggerating in the examples above.
> Layoffs because of poor management, layoffs that backfired, and layoffs without reasoning.
They did 4 bootcamps. As I already mentioned the Seville office in particular is more than crowded (more people than seats, in the first day’s people were working from the kitchen). From each bootcamp from the ~60-80 people they were firing 8-9, with great reasons (failing the bootcamp, missing "class", playing games, etc), but in the 4th bootcamp there was ~120 people and because the office was already crowded, they fired 40 people.
Another genius idea they had is fire every senior contractor and replace them with the juniors from the bootcamp. This is happening now, and they tell juniors that they have to replace their seniors without a pay raise of course. A whole project got shutdown and everyone in there got fired in it (without a notice of course) from managers to juniors. When they asked why most of them get told “Times are changing”. When you directly ask HR, they tell you “It’s a confidential matter of the company and we can’t tell you”.
>Bootcamps were a disaster.
The hiring process for the juniors was a joke. If you had a previous experience with programming, like a bootcamp in last Summer, pass an IQ test, and pass an easy programming challenge and you were basically in. I think the idea was to filter them out later (which they did). But unfortunately, they won’t be able to replace the people they are firing. In the bootcamps they were trying to teach them most of the tech stack of Solera. But that ending up creating confusion and panic to a lot of the bootcampers because they couldn’t keep up with the unreasoning load and they end up cheating or trying to pass by to not get fired, without learning much. Plus, when they got placed in teams that were not using most of that tech anyway. E.g: They focused a lot on React, but they went on refactoring Java code. So, when they got placed on a team, they had to make a deep dive on the stack that they eventually will be using.
> Ethical reasons.
They lured a lot of people in Spain from countries with less opportunities (Mexico, India, Portugal, Greece). Mexicans in particular are getting paid less for the exact same job (I think because they technically belong to “Solera Mexico”). Also, their contract kind of forces them to stay at least 2 years in Spain and if they don’t feel like staying anymore for whatever reason, they must pay back everything Solera provided them like airplane tickets, food, etc. The juniors are getting around to ~1100euros per month which is close to minimal wage here in Spain.
