The work environment is demoralizing and there is a strong feeling that the deadlines are made up and the requirements don't matter. Leadership's promises are made to be broken. Upper management is overwhelmingly patronizing, dishonest, narcissistic, and impervious to criticism. Bringing a problem to their attention or alternative suggestions are met with hostility and public -- yes, public -- insults. There is little sense of accomplishment because you are rarely given the opportunity to finish work; indeed, getting things done is a pretty abstract concept here.
Employees are considered exploitable resources, not human beings. Engineers are expected to do after-hour, weekend, and even holiday work without additional compensation. The situation for support and services is even worse. Cleo employees can look forward to being fired even after getting positive performance evaluations, and then having upper management claim it was "performance related" even when the person's immediate manager was never consulted. They fired a bunch of people this year, blaming business downturn and coronavirus, and then announced an excellent quarter. A few weeks after freezing wages and ending 401(k) matching to "save badly needed money", they proudly announced the funding of divisive political causes.
There is frequent, unexplained turnover even in upper management and C level positions. This may be explained by the attitude of the CEO, who makes no secret of his contempt for his underlings. After several engineers were fired in a surprise early-morning purge, he was asked if there were any plans to hire new people to replace losses. His reply? "I don't think we lost anybody." That same year, at the company Christmas party(!), he responded to questions about Cleo's seeming inability to hire new engineers by saying, "Eventually, the economy will go bad and we'll be able to hire whoever we want for whatever we want."
The Cleo Bangalore office is filled with indentured servants. No, really. They are hired on a bond that says they're not allowed to leave the job for several years, else they owe Cleo money. When said serfs quizzed the CEO about this, he pretended not to know what they were talking about. OK, I know that this is pretty standard in India, but it sure doesn't jive with the company's "woke" pretensions.
The only people that Cleo despises more than their employees are their customers. One example that sticks in my mind is how they announced that they would continue to support one of their products, then cancelled it in secret, refusing to let the customers know the real reason that updates weren't coming. Another widespread problem is selling "solutions" they don't have and don't actually intend to deliver. Cleo has learned that most customers' demands can be put off until it's time for a subscription renewal or an upgrade, in which case there's a mad scramble to patch all the holes in their sinking boat.
Other than all that, it's a pretty good place.
