**I will preface this by saying that I have never had an experience like this in my 8 year career. I have never had any issues with colleagues. I have never felt disrespected, ignored or gaslit at any of my past jobs. Many of my closest and dearest friends are former colleagues and managers. **
**Be aware that the majority of reviews on this company are from employees based in Sydney (company headquarters) so they don’t have the experience of working remotely at Immutable. **
I don’t even know where to begin. My experience at immutable was horrible from day 1. The red flags were always there and I chose to ignore them until they ended my contract for no reason. For the 3 months that I worked at Immutable I was absolutely miserable. As a remote worker I wasn’t ever given so much as an introduction to my team. Live Onboarding (including team building activities) was not made available to me and nothing was done to try to remedy this. Any complaint or issue I had with my team or with management was ignored by HR who eventually refused to even respond to my request for meetings for my last 3 weeks at the company. It was obvious from day 1 that the company regretted hiring me because of the crypto market crash, and that their strategy of hiring hundreds of new employees, some (like myself) without clearly defined roles, hadn’t been paying off for them. I’m not a paranoid person and more often than not I give the benefit of the doubt for a lot longer than I should, but it was obvious from my first day on the job that they were going to do absolutely nothing to make me feel supported or appreciated and that it would be up to me to either work miracles and show that I was a “high value employee” (their words) or leave. Essentially with all the odds stacked against me (no training, no support, async communications, undefined role) it was my responsibility to sink or swim and the swimming had to be immediate or it wouldn’t count. I want to acknowledge that my direct manager did make an effort to meet with me every day which was more than I could say for the team leadership or his manager who made absolutely no effort to support me in any way, including cancelling (with no notice) the only meeting they had ever put in place to introduce me to the team and discuss our work styles and how we can do our best work together. I finally learned (in their words) that it was a stressful week and it wasn’t worth making the team stay late in the Sydney office for 1 person (me). It was only 3pm in Sydney. With async communications comes time lags and things that should be done by a certain date get pushed out because sometimes a task isn’t effectively communicated (especially one that isn’t clear due to lack of role clarity). There was no forgiveness for this and although I was working 12 hour days and occasional weekends, flexibility wasn’t an option. I’d like to add that I was the first hire on the team in my time zone so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that with my help they could figure out how to support me and future hires in my area but from what I observed, my team leadership was not at all interested in this.
Eventually I received a “coaching plan” for my alleged failure to deliver whatever I was supposed to deliver (always judged subjectively or given an arbitrary deadline that didn’t make sense for something like an analysis of a long term partnership which I needed to have results for after 1 week). The coaching plan was to be signed in docusign. The agreement to be signed was that I would accomplish everything in the plan by x date or face further punitive action. HR made themselves completely unavailable for me to contact and discuss until at least a week had passed. Then it was some “we just want to support you and have no intention of getting rid of you” gaslighting. If I ever disagreed with my colleagues (all men) I was being “difficult” (I believe the exact words were “wasting time debating”). I was giving my strategic advice on a partner that I was an expert on (a previous employer) and they (admittedly) knew nothing about. Apparently disagreeing with them was not acceptable, something that I would have respected if I had been aware of this unspoken rule. I was blindsided. So after I accomplished everything in my coaching plan (and received accolades from my colleagues, including being asked to present my work in a spotlight at another team’s meeting), I was completely shocked when I was told abruptly in a 1-1 that I was being terminated during my probation period (the first 6 months of every contract), effective immediately. All of my accounts were deleted on the spot and I couldn’t even say goodbye to my colleagues. I know this was for the best because you should never stay at a job where you spend most days crying but it didn’t make this any easier. For the company’s part, I was provided with a 1 month’s severance pay.
