* The formerly-awesome culture started to shift around the time of the IPO, was bad by mid-2022, and was entirely destroyed by the end of January 2023. Nearly everything negative I am about to write did not apply before this and I would have never expected from the company and I team I loved working for before 2022. What was once a great place to work became toxic.
* Way too much middle management and HR has been added - made-up things with meaningless responsibilities like "strategy and operations," and way too many managers who didn't and couldn't do anything of value were added, while skilled, technical positions were de-prioritized and weren't filled when vacated. Toxic authoritarians who can't do anything technical compensate for their lack of skills by asserting power over the skilled.
* A significant increase in absolutely useless busywork (coinciding with the increase of way too much middle management). This was coupled with (1) poor user interfaces for useless busywork (2) being scolded by management who couldn't do anything useful if you didn't drop doing your real job immediately to do busywork (3) being scolded by the same management for not doing useless busywork during PTO.
* A culture that does not recognize nor reward employees for working long and odd hours but instead emphasizes busywork created by middle management.
* A serious failure to promote from within and respect the people who helped build Confluent, and instead bring in outsiders who know nothing about the company before 2021.
* Professional Services and Education was essentially destroyed by a failure to promote from within and the hiring of an outside VP in 2022, following by hiring his useless friend for a made-up position is useless. Both people took a team that used to be filled with joyful, caring people who once enjoyed even socializing with one another and sucked the fun out of it. Both were extremely toxic, cold, mean individuals who treated team members like dirt. While it was never confirmed the two events were linked, these two individuals' rise to power and a mass exodus of several big names in PS happened too closely together for it to have just been coincidental.
* A total 180 from having been a company that offered things to support for open-source Apache Kafka to an emphasis on Confluent Cloud only, to the point of management essentially saying core Apache Kafka didn't matter.
* A de-emphasis on technical matters and on people. Probably the worst thing that happened was when all-hands meetings went from Zoom meetings where employees could see each other to to "webinars" that are essentially TV shows where the important people flaunt how important they are. All-hands meetings by 2022 almost never talk about anything technical (or Kafka), and instead are dominated by business jargon. It seems like of the few special people who get to be on the all-hands TV show, it would be surprising if 20% of them could pass the first exam of a first-semester programming course., which is really sad for a tech company.
* A continued removal of perks and benefits. Perks aren't essential, but cutting them and not increasing compensation is cold. Someone decided that cutting home Internet reimbursement around the time the whole company went remote was a good idea? No, that's cold. Then other things started slowly trickling away and joke raises lower than inflation rates were all we got.
