Close to 900 employees of WhitHat Jr sent in their two weeks’ notice to their management and quit the education tech start-up over the past three months after they were asked to come back to office after a long period of working from home.
WhiteHat Jr is a platform where kids and enthusiasts can learn the art and science of coding from the comfort of their own homes. Although the company is mainly known for their coding programmes, they also offer, math, music, and art classes for kids from ages 6-18 all across India. The company was founded 4 years ago, back in 2018 and its head office is situated in Mumbai. The company was fully acquired by Bangalore based education tech firm BYJUS recently as well.
The company sent out a blast email to their employees giving them a month’s time to come back to office as they plan to end their work from home situation. The email was on 18th of March and they expected people to start working at office by 18th of April.
Close to 900 of their employees have hence quit and they have no intentions to come back to work at the office. The employees who quit come from various departments of the company including math, tech, coding and the sales team. It is expected that even more employees are set to quit the company continuing the mass exodus.
One of the workers who quit was asked to why they quit and he said that the company gave them one month which is just not enough time to relocate and move to another city where they need to search for affordable housing and other utilities. Some people have spouses and kids and other familial ties. You can’t sort all of that in one month while moving to a new city. People have all sorts of responsibilities to tend to and it was very tone deaf for the company’s higher ups to give such a short period to relocate thousands of employees just to get them to come to office.
Some other employees also took into account the salary that is being paid to them and came to the conclusion that its just not enough to move back and live in another city just for work. The company has offices in Gurugram, Bombay, and Bengaluru and the company should revise their pay grade if they are to keep their employees.
