I would argue that there are far more bad managers/leaders than there are good. By good managers, I mean folks who actually care about you, give you honest feedback about what you're doing well and how you can improve, are clear about the expectations for your role, and help you grow within the company.
Most of the managers at Urban Airship are not actually interested in managing their teams. They refuse to accept any feedback that is not good feedback, which is problematic when you consider that they say they're open to any and all feedback. Some managers do not discipline folks who are not performing well and will move them up through the ranks for reasons unknown.
I can't speak to all teams, but the team I worked on in particular had an issue with fair distribution of work. On this team, you'd have one or two people doing more work than the rest of the team combined, and yet somehow they would be ranked at a similar level to other employees on the team come review time.
Customer Success is almost entirely excluded from hack weeks, even though there are people on that side of the organization who are interested in coding or would like to contribute to a project. Speaking of that, there is a huge divide between Customer Success and Engineering in general. There's almost no communication between these two departments and oftentimes some of the folks on the engineering side treated others in a condescending manner.
There's also an incredible amount of product bloat and bug fixes are almost always shoved off to the side. Upper management is only interested in making money, which hey, I guess that's what a lot of businesses are about. However, there are plenty of other great start ups in the Portland area that work towards growth without treating their employees like they're replaceable and even invest back into the community.
