The top leadership has been built of people who extol grind culture like it's the best thing to happen since sliced bread. There's a lot of talk about ongoing education and looking out for new training and exploration opportunities, but one of the KPI's is keeping work for clients around 90% of time use. You get docked and possibly put on a PIP for doing training. Additionally, most digital producers are loaded up with enough clients that they can barely cover all the task needs for them with the hours they have. It is possible to make more money if you take more clients and work more hours, but it's a real quality of life see-saw that does not favor existing outside work. I didn't think it was worth what little extra money came in for the extra effort, and most the people I spoke to agreed.
Which meant that the Digital Producer team saw a lot of turnover.
There are weekly meetings where the COO talks about sales and profit and state of the company stuff that's ultimately fully divorced from the daily experience of working there. It doesn't matter to the people working whether there was a million or a million and a half dollars in sales last month. The workload is what it is.
The CEO and COO are racist and misogynist; they do try to pretend not to be, which I guess is nice. But if you read any of Joel's personal writings, it's wildly awful, particularly about reproductive health. I've spoken to team leads (sort of middle management) about their teams, and I was told explicitly by at least one person that they specifically hire for analysis teams from the global south in order to pay less, even when there have been equally qualified candidates elsewhere. And even then, I've had some friends on analysis teams that have talked about how the pay is not commensurate with their cost of living.
All of this is couched under the banner of a meritocracy, but what the company leadership conveniently leaves out of that discussion is that two white guys, who hold some pretty exploitative (and/or despicable) views are the people defining what has merit in the company.