Pros
Myntra as a company is generally over-hyped to be this heavenly place to work. Its glowing image is nothing but a myth. I was super excited when I got the opportunity to work there and refused other offers to work there. The interview process itself was long drawn out and took forever – I was stood up by the interviewers multiple times, it took 2 months to conduct four rounds of interviews, nothing was organized properly. I should’ve paid heed to these warning signals, but the halo surrounding Myntra blurred out all these red flags. As a result, I suffered and I was out in a year. Pros: 1) Myntra has the best-in-class HR policies. They give a lot of employee perks and they have possibly the best diversity and inclusion policy in India. (This exists mostly on paper only though - there is not really any diversity at the company.) 2) You can learn a lot in a short span. With the pace of things, you wouldn’t have a choice. 3) Clarity about covid work situation. They kept us clearly informed about when (if at all) we were expected to return to office. Not much else, really. I had think to think really hard to come up with some pros.
Cons
Sigh. Where do I begin? I am scarred for life, having worked here. It has affected me a lot - physically and mentally. I'll probably need therapy just to get over these years I've worked at Myntra. So much unnecessary stress is piled on top of employees. It is an organization run not by principles but according to the haphazard whims of those who manage. 1) Work life balance. NIGHTMARE. Forget your personal life. Welcome to non-stop mental stress. Signing up to work here means they expect you to slave away 24 x 7 x 365. They do not care if it’s Diwali, they do not care if you’re getting married, they do not care if you were working away continuously for the past 10 days. If they call you, you are expected to work. There is absolutely no respect for personal boundaries. Nobody bats an eyelid before calling you to assign work on a Saturday night. Since everyone plays along with it, you would seem weird if you push back. Some people positively enjoy this sort of lifelessness and it baffles me. The work might not even be that important, the work could have been structured better during the weekdays by your manager – but nope. You will be forced to pay for the inefficiencies of your manager. You are supposed to proud of this inefficiency and call it “hard work”. Everything depends on the whim on your manager and if he decides to pursue some obscure number on a weekend, bid bye-bye to your weekend plans (Most of these managers don’t seem to have any personal lives or marriages or families to care for, so it’s very common to notice people replying to mails at 3 AM or midnight). There is no organization-wide structure to ensure work life balance. This became especially worse during covid, but it was egregious to begin with. The HR team sends out many mails about mental health blah blah blah but if they actually cared about it, they would do something about it. 2) Work delegation – There is no proper organized structure in place to balance work flows. You can get work anywhere, everywhere. There are no proper meetings to discuss WIP. There will be random mails, random pings on hangouts, random messages on WhatsApp, everywhere. There is no proper use of any ticketing tool or something like Microsoft Teams to manage work. Everything here is so haphazard. The worst part of working here is knowing that your WhatsApp will never be yours again. You will never look forward to messaging friends there anymore. Every time you open it with dread wondering if any work is going to drop your way, on top of an already tall pile of WIP. Doesn’t matter if it is a holiday or you are on vacation you can never be peaceful with these stupid work WhatsApp groups forever buzzing. You can mute them, but there’s no way to make them go away forever unless you exit them. It is an absolute mess and nobody wants to think about the right way to do it. They just like being chaotic and revel in their lack of organization. (Pro tip – if you are planning to join Myntra, get a separate sim card just for your work WhatsApp so that you have the ability to switch off outside of working hours. Trust me, you will not regret it.) 3) There is no clear vision, at least in the team I was a part of. Everything was a temporary fix. We weren’t allowed proper deadlines to do things the right way, to ensure that they would be stable in the long run. There will be an impossible deadline of 3 days for a work that would rightly require 7. As they believe in temporary wins over long-term stability, getting work done only gets infinitely complex in the long run. Everyone only cares about pandering to their manager and appeasing them. These high-level managers have no idea regarding the infrastructural constraints or the current workload and they just want their work completed. At any point of time, any analyst/associate would have to deal with some 4-5 people like this. 4) Rude managers – The managers (at least in my team) got away with a lot of behaviour which would be considered unacceptable in other, proper organizations. They are casually rude to employees and have no qualms whatsoever about their attitudes. The employees would be criticized for not managing their work load properly when it was the incompetence of the manager that landed them there in the first place. 5) The data infrastructure at Myntra is ridiculous. The databases are super slow and not at all suited for use at a large scale. This would lead to a lot of report failures, for which again the analysts would be blamed. 6) Communication etiquette is completely missing, especially among the people in the Operations side of things. They have no decency, they show no courtesy and they make work requests as if you exist solely to serve their needs. 7) Bro culture is the norm. At least in supply chain teams. It is the substitute for actual professionalism.
