The American IT company Alchemy dismissed the entire team of Ukrainian testers in one day. Comments of ex-employees

The American IT company Alchemy laid off the entire Ukrainian QA department in one day-seven employees. According to ex-employees, they were denied access to corporate services without warning, without even notifying them about the reduction. The company itself does not comment on this, although they have previously expressed support for Ukrainians in connection with the war. We talked to former employees of the company about the situation.

Alchemy develops lending software. Its products allow companies to collect data about their customers and use it through special analytics and credit risk modeling. The company is based in Irvine, California, USA and has about 100 employees.

Alexey Zaichenko, former head of Quality Assurance Alchemy, spoke on LinkedIn about the reduction of the company's Ukrainian QA department. According to him, employees were dismissed in one day — on March 14, without warning and the opportunity to finish while they are looking for a new job. We asked Alexey about the situation in detail. Here's what he said:

Alchemy and CEO Timothy Lee made a "very difficult" decision to disband the entire QA (UA) team and fired everyone in one day, without any warnings or Notis periods, even a simple "thank you guys for your work." Everyone just got a message that their account was deactivated in their corporate Google account. The funny thing is, I was in a meeting with an Alchemy client when my account was deactivated and I was thrown out of MIT. Real "support" for Ukrainians.

Therefore, think twice before going to work for this company or ordering services from them — with a high probability, this work will be done by incompetent people who happen to be in this company and will soon be dismissed in a day, just like our Ukrainian team.

I note that there are still good specialists and people here (unfortunately, not many), but it seems to me that this will not last long.

Now people, in addition to the terrible stress of the Russian-Ukrainian war and the horror that Russia has brought to our land, have also received additional stress from Alchemy. We can say that this is almost a business partner of Russia-it helps to demoralize the Ukrainian people even faster and destroy the country's economy.

And this is a message from Alchemy about how grateful they are that they have such a head of QA, and do PR on my face.

And the reason is not that the team was bad and didn't do their job, but that Tim wants to make more profit from the business and pay less salaries. You may have noticed that I didn't mention "keeping the same quality products" because the same quality won't happen. That is why Alchemy has entered into a partnership agreement with the Indian company Theecode Technologies Pvt Ltd to hire cheaper labor (there are no questions about this company). This is what the company has already done in 2020. At that time, only Americans worked in them, but they were gradually replaced by employees from Ukraine and Mexico with lower wages.

Four of the colleagues who were fired are my former students from BeQA Today (a project that allows people with disabilities to get free education and basic knowledge in the specialty "software testing"), which already in QA circles in Ukraine explains the level of training and quality of these specialists.

I didn't care (and still don't care) about myself and the fact that I would be fired (I even thought at first that I was fired solely for being a manager), and I was absolutely satisfied with that.

But, as it turned out, everyone was fired for this approach. I contacted the representatives of the intermediary company, and they informed me that Timothy Lee told them about the decision to fire our team.

To this day, Timothy Lee was my source of inspiration and an example of a cool CEO and leader, I was wrong. Now I see the true nature of this man."

We also spoke to several other dismissed team members on condition of anonymity. Next, we submit their comments:

Manual QA Engineer:

"I worked since October 2020, a year and a half, it turns out. On an hourly basis, fulltime. 40 hours per week. At first, I was thrown out of Jira, Slack. I was sitting sorting tickets, it was 17:48 when I was thrown out. Then it turned out that not only I have this.

No one announced their dismissal. Then led asked the intermediary company Awwcor (outstaffing company), they confirmed that we were already unemployed.

Earlier, the owner of the company in the chat expressed support for Ukrainians in connection with the war. He spoke words of care. He published on his LinkedIn page an appeal to Putin calling for an end to the bloodshed. Earlier, financial assistance was paid to all employees from Ukraine. In mid-February, along with the salary for January, everyone was given a bonus of 1 1,000. The salary for February was paid earlier than usual, and there was also a bonus of 1 1,000 per employee plus 5 500 for each child.

I am truly grateful for this help. It was very useful. We created a chat for Ukrainians in Telegram for communication. That's why I couldn't immediately believe that we were all fired. It just goes against all actions and words.

I think we were fired because we hired testers from India. Earlier, the company started a trend to hire developers from this country. Several testers arrived last week. Previously, only we, from Ukraine, were. According to PM, testers from India and Ukraine will work together, but we were fired. That's how they decided to save money."

QA Engineer:

"I have been working for the company since July 2021. On March 14, I was at the Daily rally, then I started testing and suddenly at 16:30 everything stopped. I started to understand and write to colleagues who didn't know this yet at the time of my appeal. There were no messages, just cut off access to all tools.

Everything in the company was good and very pro-Ukrainian. We were supported and sympathized with. I have a feeling that just because of the reduced quality, we found cheaper staff. And this is normal for business. It is not normal for a business to dismiss qualified personnel in this way. Without any warning.

I'll post my resume and look for a job. The level of QA specialists in our team is very high, and the motivation to produce a high-quality product is also high. The personal characteristics of each person in our team are simply off the scale: willingness to help, support, friendliness and experience of communication in a multicultural team."

We sent a request to the company and CEO Timothy Lee personally with a request to comment on the situation, but at the time of publication of the material, we did not receive a response.

Earlier, the company on LinkedIn expressed support for Ukrainians and thanked those who made a donation to help Ukrainian Alchemy employees.

In addition, Timothy Lee also expressed support for Ukraine.

If the company responds to our request, we will update the article.