Wasn’t kidding when he said “turn the ship in 2020”
Pros
This job was my dream job. Or at least I thought it was. There are brilliant people that work here, and the company was incredibly well organized internally. Additionally, the app itself is amazing. There’s nothing on the market quite like DataRobot.
Cons
DataRobot is a unicorn. They just raised another $300 million dollars in September of 2019. Any company that has that that much capital and makes the unfortunate decision to cut employees claiming fears of an economic fallout over COVID-19 frankly loses my respect. COVID-19 was DataRobot’s easy scapegoat for years of believing they were untouchable: they grew too fast, spent too much money on office perks, and had one to many acquisitions. Rather than cut those operational expenditures, they played with people’s livelihoods instead. DataRobot claimed they had to make these difficult decisions now so that they could take care of their people later. The connotations of that rhetoric, as a big chunk of their employees get laid off, says a lot about gross ineptitude and emotional hollowness of those at the top. Don’t make this about ‘taking care of your people’. What about your people you just pushed out the door into, as you described it, “winter”?