octo

If you’re a junior on the UX/UI Design side, I wouldn’t recommend coming to Octo. I was sold training access—a plan to help me build my skills. But they denied my access to the training courses, even though the participants didn’t even show up. They’d rather throw money out the window on trainings than offer them to the people who actually need them to upskill—just because they’re still in their probation period.

I was put on a “Shadow” project within a public service mission for six months—basically, I was there as a free decorative plant for the client. No alerts were raised during my time there. I was given a list of goals to accomplish, but I was also made to understand that my presence on the mission was “more than recommended.” They also explain that to land a mission, “you have to be in the right pipeline, you know…”

Bottom line: they ended my probation because I wasn’t meeting expectations. Octo took six months to realize it, even though, at the beginning, it wasn’t an issue at all. The truth is, it’s illegal to terminate a probation period for economic reasons—so as long as they can keep loading the burden onto a junior consultant, why would they stop? Why not just take the risk instead of owning up to the business difficulty on the P&D side?

And to top it off, last week I missed a professional opportunity because the recruiter—who had the pleasure of a “salariée friend” who was connected to one of my former colleagues I never worked with directly—was incredibly happy to paint a glowing professional picture of me, while only feeding back the negative about me. That’s the famous Octo “benevolence”: you try to get yourself back on track, and somehow they still manage to smear you in the mud when all you want is to bounce back.