Deel reviews

Where do I start? If you work as a contractor, you'll find out their business tactic is not the only thing that's aggressive. There's 18 days of PTO, which is under what most countries in Europe offer. You can't take more than 5 (or something around that) national holidays. All of this would be decent, were it not for the policy of requiring special permission from an executive to get more than 3 consecutive days. The "flexible time" is not for the employee. This is a very important point. The "flexible time" benefits the employer. On my first day I was informed that I should install Slack on my personal phone and be ready to reply at all times, even in the evening. It's not a "fill your calendar with 8 hours of work" situation, it's a "fill your calendar with 8 hours of work and 6 hours of on-call, in case someone needs you". But well, you're a contractor. I wouldn't normally complain, but I was a contractor for other companies in the past, all of which offered much better terms (like your national holidays being respected, along with consecutive PTO without having special approval). This is not bad on Deel's part. Just below expectations. The real mess starts once you start working. I cannot and I will not speak for all teams, since I'm not sure how those are managed, but the team I was part of was incredibly disorganized. Even setting things up to start working is a very long and tedious operation, with things constantly breaking. You have to contact a lot of people before you can even pick up your first task. This can be quite common in a lot of companies, but it was something my manager complained about. "I was taking too long", but in reality it was something that was outside of my control. Documentation is not kept up to date intentionally since, as they claim, things change continuously and it's not worth it. This is one more thing that will delay you, for which you will be penalized. The tasks that I was given right off the bat required in-depth understanding of how multiple components operated. I raised this with the team manager, saying it would be better to ease me into understanding the entire project with some smaller tasks, but I was simply told I was wrong for thinking that, and that the team "depends on me". Well, as I had no say in this, I attempted these tasks. Since I lacked the understanding, I requested help. The people helping me (architects and team leads) were not on the same page. This is how I ended up re-implementing the same feature three times. And what did management understand from this? Maybe "our team needs to re-evaluate how we design systems together, so that we can produce high-quality work individually", or "it seems like we're going too fast at the moment, maybe we should slow down and review our strategy". No, the team manager looked at the Jira card, didn't ask for any explanation and simply stated that it's unacceptable to spend 3 weeks on a task. Throughout all of this, it felt like leadership worked against me. It felt like there was no accountability on their side. My experience has taught me that if those you lead fail, it's your responsibility to offer support and make things right. The way they "made it right" was by insulting me by claiming I'm not skilled enough at what I do and then firing me. "It's okay. This space here is for the best of the best, and unfortunately you didn't make the cut." No questions asked. It was unilaterally established that I'm not good at what I do, and that I'm the problem. For the readers, keep in mind that I might actually just suck at my job. It's their way of handling employee performance issues that's the problem, not the fact that they called me "stupid". I would not have these thoughts were it not for my past experiences. I was only fired one other time in my career, but it was a constructive experience. I felt validated, understood and respected, despite the fact that I was literally getting fired. Deel will offer you a job where it's "survival of the fittest", where there's no respect for your life as an individual and where management has no idea what they're doing. They pay quite well, though.

-Would often see unprofessional/rude comments in slack from managers and senior leadership. Even the smallest errors would be put on blast and multiple ppl called out and publicly shamed. -Didn’t matter how much you already had on your plate, everything was considered an emergency and you would be expected to drop everything to correct something that could be done later. Or multiple ppl would be tagged and distracted from tasks, to fix something one person could easily handle. -No warning or insight given on drastic job changes. We were lucky to get slack post. Often had to find out about changes after making mistake and then being told we did something wrong. -Lack of training or any kind of support for development. As mentioned, job would change with little to no warning, the most you would get is slack post the day of and be expected to perform with 100% accuracy. This was an unrealistic expectation and it was common to make many errors in a day. Over time this led to a lot of frustration with the position and constantly feeling like a failure. -Weekly one on ones with manager were useless and waste of time. They would ask me how I was doing, and call would be done in 30 seconds. There were never discussions about growth or goals and if I ever brought up an issue the response was always along the lines of “try asking someone else” -If you ever brought up an issue on a team call or questioned any announcement from management, you would be outcast. They would constantly ask for feedback but if you were honest you were labelled as a “bad employee” or someone who couldn’t handle “Deel speed” -Performance was purely based off metrics, it didn’t matter if you had an unrealistic workload you had to keep response times within SLA’s. They don’t care if you work 12 hours a day as long as your metrics look good. If you brought up how much you had to do and how it was an unrealistic expectation they would accuse you of not managing your time properly. -Unlimited PTO was not a perk. Work would pile up while you were gone. Felt guilty leaving co-workers because the workload was unreasonable when you were fully staffed, you knew leaving would be putting a crazy amount of pressure on other people. -The focus was always on adding new features to the product and client/employee relations would be left to the wayside. Growth is important but so is stability. Often features would be left behind by the product team and we would be left dealing with 100’s of complaints because something didn’t work or was broken and they refused to fix it because they needed to spend all their time working on the next new feature. It was incredibly frustrating and embarrassing to have to apologize multiple times a day for our product not working the way we had promised. We would constantly follow up to try and have issues resolved and it seemed like endless loop and was rare to ever actually find solution. -Most days struggled with anxiety attacks from the lack of stability and pressure to respond to everything instantly. You develop PTSD from slack and you never know when your going to get put on blast for something or get harassed for answers on a minor error or slip up. Also, the workload was never consistent and you would just have to pray that you would have a reasonable amount of tasks in a day, and that you wouldn’t be bombarded with side projects.