Where do I even begin.
The company just settled a $630 million lawsuit over anti-competitive practices and data-access fees. Then in 2024, a ransomware attack shut down operations and they allegedly paid $25 million in cryptocurrency to hackers. Neither of these surprises anyone who’s been paying attention to how little gets invested in this company’s infrastructure and ethical standards.
The former CEO came from Intel where he’d admitted to an affair with a subordinate. That set the moral tone immediately and raised serious questions about how women are treated and protected when that kind of behavior is tolerated at the top. The current CEO, who was CEO once before, came back to slash costs.
Nobody communicates. Leadership makes decisions then simply doesn’t tell the people who need to implement them. I spent hours trying to figure out what was expected only to learn the approach had changed. It’s demoralizing and embarrassing to constantly feel like the last person to know anything.
Product management. This is specialized automotive dealership software yet most product owners have never worked in a dealership. They don’t understand dealership operations. The pattern goes like this, products become outdated, customers cancel, leadership panics and buys a smaller company to fill the gap, then systematically destroys that company’s culture trying to stitch their technology into CDK’s existing system. Rinse, repeat. I watched talented people from acquisitions become quickly demoralized.
The DEI program is about looking differently but thinking identically. It’s about prancing from event to event mouthing buzzwords and handing out and receiving “awards” (think FIFA peace Prize.) The entire program is one person’s personal brand, that’s it.
The layoffs are ruthless and arbitrary. I watched genuinely talented people get laid off purely for financial reasons. Performance didn’t matter. Seniority didn’t matter. It was simply about being in the wrong department when the budget cuts came through.
The company is in managed decline. There is no vision, no innovation strategy, no investment in the future. Just cost-cutting, reactive product development, and extracting whatever value remains from aging products. The $630 million settlement and $25 million ransom payment aren’t isolated incidents.
