Leadership, or lack of. The owner of the company has no problem firing people on a whim. He is more interested in a fleet of "yes men" than actually improving himself or his company. If he hears you questioning his ideas or even hears a hint of you being negative, you'll end up on his bad side and may be fired for no reason. The owner is in charge, but he won't actually fire you, he'll get someone else to do it while he hides in his office. He gets frustrated when he sees the parking lot empty at 5 o'clock, and seems to expect people to work more than 40 hours a week. All while telling you to your face that Autosoft has a great work-life balance...
Under-qualified "leaders". Listen to your employees and understand what they do. The owner of the company recently hired some individuals with the intention that these new hires would empower the development teams and allow the SMEs to drive the direction of their product. What has played out could not be more different. The owner agrees to changes to the core product with no market research or validation. He says we are moving towards Agile, but contradicts himself within the same sentence. I truly believe he does not care about or listen to his employees and makes decisions based on his own interests. He calls the shots and fires hard-working, knowledgeable people who get in his way. He doesn't deal with problems himself, but deflects them to people who shouldn't have to deal with them. He'd rather hire unqualified, clueless individuals and defend them to death. Even when they have serious criminal backgrounds.
Lack of trust and witch hunts. After the recent negative Glassdoor posts, the owner started a witch hunt to find out who had been posting criticism. He has been pouring though chat conversations and emails trying to find the "bad seeds". He's more interested in firing the people who he thinks are voicing concerns than fixing the problems being voiced. Furthermore, he has been recruiting people to post positive reviews of him and the company. Problems had previously been voiced internally, and he continued to brush them off as if they didn't exist. But as soon as things went public, he started accusing people of being negative and said (real quote) "I wish the negative people would just leave". The owner has been willing to lose and/or fire countless good, knowledgeable, hard-working employees, and has said the people leaving "just can't handle change".
As soon as employees started exposing his "shiny apple" of a company as a deeply flawed, poisonous environment, he initiated damage control and started deflecting blame. He started recruiting employees to post positive feedback on Glassdoor to offset the negative reviews. Don't believe me? Look at the trends. No reviews (positive or negative) had been posted in almost 4 months, but as soon as a bad one showed up (November 7th), there were 7 positive reviews posted in less than a week. The company even had one of the bad reviews removed (or found out who posted it and incentivized the person to remove it).
All in all, no amount of negative reviews will change anything. If you come work for Autosoft, you should know that you will have no voice. Any concern you raise will be squashed. Any good idea you have will be claimed by leadership as THEIR idea. No one at the top will admit fault, and when things go south, YOU may be put on the chopping block.
