I was working in AccionLabs for a year. Worked on a single long project for my whole tenure.
At that time they use 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 was receiving a salary for the last 4 months. My project manager and CTO were kind of rude in every meeting they will discuss some random employees’ performance and why they should warn them to install PIP (Performance Improvement Program) on them or why should he or she has to be fired etc. They were a few billable employees who sat ideal doing nothing.
It was such a situation that every two or three days three or four employees use to resign and leave the company. The company ask them to resign but hosts a send-off party somehow out of no shame. Even two colleagues left told in the send-off party’s last speech that they had no work since joining or for the last 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 remove the alternate cell background color as it is more work. It was more work for developers but what about users if they are unable to differentiate between two rows etc?
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. Already one UX Designer left when I interacted with him he told me AccionLab is Developer first they just don’t concern about design even though he had the same experience of being told to change 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 then he suddenly reacts to Mandar and the team never told me this is the requirement they are hiding everything from me. So he becomes my trust issue to trust 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 again and again. It was funny he would take 5 days to just 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 bright 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 have installed PIP on me. I told them I had no project for the last three months so better I resign and that I am not interested in PIP. I took this decision as I know 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 bad that I resigned but I just 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 run away and avoid that awkward situation.
I hope the situation in that company improves and I wish the best of luck to them.
Thanks & Regards
Mandar Apte
