I thought Calendly would be a great place to work, but within my first three months I realized it was nothing what the interviews had led me to believe.
In my experience at Calendly, management was disorganized, inconsistent, and frequently dismissive of legitimate concerns. Expectations would change without warning, and leadership was quick to place blame on individuals for problems outside our control.
For months, I was told on a weekly basis that I was doing "great" work. Then during my performance review, I was suddenly told I was not meeting expectations, with no clear examples, no documented concerns, and no guidance on how to improve. That is not effective management. It reflects a lack of accountability and transparency.
I was assigned to projects that later had key resources removed, and I was still held responsible for missed deadlines despite being left without the support required to succeed.
I worked on the monetization engineering team during my time there, and it was one of the worst engineering environments I have experienced in my career. It was an incredible echo chamber.
Interactions with managers often felt subjective rather than grounded in clear communication or documented feedback. It was a weekly/monthly reoccurrence where management was so disorganized they did not realize or remember the work I was doing even with me giving verbal/written updates to them directly. A week would pass by and they would get on to me for not doing the work, but I would have paper trails of me showing them that it was completed.
After all of these experiences with a completely mishandled performance review, we had a work retreat where they had the audacity to force us to sit in a "trust building" exercise. They put the onus on us to say that we need to learn to trust each other better.
That's when I put my two week notice in.
