Worst Company, No Ethics - werkgeversreview Intern bij Nuclei

Hi - This is Ankur. I am really sorry that we made you feel this way. Obviously there is a lot to learn for me and I definitely want to learn from my past mistakes and become a better leader. April last year was a very uncertain period - for the whole world, let alone the Indian economy, banking vertical, startups, etc. Whole world went into a lock-down and there were talks about doomsday scenarios everywhere. We were no different. As a company, we had to take decisions which would be in the long term interest and help the company survive (and keep the team employed) in the long run. While doing that, we were clear about a few aspects, 1. We will not lay off people for financial reasons. We did not institute a fixed salary cut across the board or lay-off a big % of the team like many other companies did last year. Our intent was to keep the team together and sacrifice together, so as to come out stronger - together! We asked people above a certain salary band to take a voluntary salary cut and compensated them with twice the value in ESARs at a 50% discount. Those ESARs are very valuable today. Obviously Adarsh and I took 80% salary cut from March to Nov 2020. For everyone else, we started rolling back salary cuts from Aug'20 onwards and returned back to normal salaries from Oct'20 as revenue returned back to normal as well. 2. Right person for the right role. This has been our motto since late 2019. Pandemic or no pandemic, we believe that we have to stay true & fair to the team and long term goals of the company. That also means finding people who are the right fit for us. We want to work with smart, hard working yet humble people. Build a high trust culture based on freedom and respect. Yet sometimes even high performers / amazing people do not fit into a team for various reasons. So, even though we decided to not lay off for financial reasons, we continued taking decisions on the basis of fitment into the team, and had to ask 8/39 interns to leave. In hindsight, could we have communicated this better? Of course yes. And that's one big mistake from 2020. 3. Focus on the long term During the lock down, we wanted to focus primarily on getting back to normal asap. And that required the team to be focused on getting our house in order. We decided to absorb 12/39 interns who were already working in immediate revenue generating teams and deferred the joining dates of 19 interns at the time. **We did not lay them off.** 11/19, got other jobs in the next few months and by Jan'21 we had absorbed the 8 remaining. All 19 got placed within a few months. We tried to help everyone as best as we could to find other jobs and they all got placed into other companies. Obviously their college TPOs, friends & family helped. Given the difficult year we all have had - where we have all lost either family members or friends - I just want to put things in perspective. Jobs of all the people we deferred were secure, we just pushed the joining date back by a few months. I am sorry that we could not do justice with everyone and surely we made a lot of mistakes too. But that's the journey of constant learning we are on. We could have definitely handled the situation better and communicated better for sure. We have definitely learnt from the experience and have handled such delicate situations with much more care since then. Our team is our core product. Just like while building a new product, we make mistakes, rectify them and make the product better. At Nuclei, we are also on the same journey. We are constantly striving to make our team better and develop process / programs which will help the team become better. Whether it is the 25% team ownership of the company (sharing the wealth created with the team), various learning sessions we organise or the Friday 2nd half we keep aside for self-learning. We (the whole team including the CTO and CEO) are not perfect, far from it. But we are constantly trying to become a better version of ourselves. We are trying our best to provide freedom to each and every individual in the company to execute to the best of their abilities. But freedom also brings along a lot of responsibilities. Those who thrive while taking on more responsibilities, will definitely thrive at Nuclei.