I worked in AccionLabs for a year. I worked on a single long project for my whole tenure.
At that time, they used to have offices in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. And they were supposed to open an office in Pune when I left the company.
I joined AccionLabs as a Senior User Experience Designer. When I started interacting with my senior staff, who were UX Architects or Project Managers, all were over-stuffed with projects out of their capacity. I was working in the Mumbai office, so I don’t know about office culture in other offices. There was a sense of uneasiness everywhere. Employees were allowed to play cricket outside during office hours. One employee never showed up to work but received a salary for the last four months. My project manager and CTO were rude in every meeting. They will discuss some random employees’ performance and why they should warn them to install PIP (Performance Improvement Program) or why they should have been fired. They were a few billable employees who sat ideal doing nothing.
It was such a situation that three or four employees resigned and left the company every two or three days. The company ask them to resign but hosts a send-off party somehow out of no shame. Even two colleagues told in the send-off party’s last speech that they had no work since joining or for the previous four months, and the company asked them to resign, so they did. The churn rate was high.
One experience I was that all projects were messed up with code quality. Developers were creating more bugs than writing clear code. I was UX Designer. When I interact with developers, they will dictate the design by saying to remove the bottom line and the alternate cell background color as it is more work. It was more work for developers, but what about users who cannot differentiate between two rows?
AccionLabs would host a global conference dedicated to impressing clients by inviting them to Goa. They would impress them by telling false stories of third-party languages or frameworks and substituting native mobile languages like Swift for iPhone and replacing them with Flutter, which is slow and cumbersome to interact with.
For Mumbai, they hired a new UX Manager/Head. One UX Designer left when I interacted with him; he told me AccionLab is a Developer’s first company; they are not concerned about design even though he had the same experience of being exposed to changing the design. The new Design Manager called, Singh was more erotic and sexually explicit than I ever imagined. He started overlooking my project. If he ever got a counter about why UX design doesn’t adhere to specific requirements, he suddenly reacted to Mandar, and the team never told me this was the requirement. They are hiding everything from me. So he becomes my trust issue with trusting this manager or not, or someday he will make me a scapegoat to hide his stupidity. The new manager would comment on any girl’s clothing. He would take a meeting for six hours, repeating his comments repeatedly. It was funny he would take five days to understand the project and forget the next day what was discussed. I heard him telling the HR team multiple teams hire girl candidates only for UX or any other designer’s position. Asking HR Recruiter to choose or bring girls or “लडकिंयोंको बुलाव” in Hindi is a shining example of sexism in the workplace.
One day he stopped giving me a design project, and I was sidelined. A new girl who joined as a Communication Designer started getting UX Work, and I have to help her with that. So the situation was fishy. One fine day I received an email from HR that they had installed PIP on me. I told them I had no project for the last three months and would be better if I resigned and was not interested in PIP. I took this decision as I knew there was no project in the pipeline for the next three months, and the company was out of project and client leads. The UX Manager felt terrible that I resigned, but I avoided his interaction and walked away. The next day my colleague told me he was crying because I didn’t talk to him. But the company situation was messy and in the wrong hands.
When it was my last day, they arranged cake cutting for me too, but I ran away and avoided that awkward situation.
I hope the situation in that company improves, and I wish the best of luck to them.
Thanks & Regards
Mandar Apte