Time Machine - Anonymous employee C3 AI Employee Review

- Top down, command-style management combined with lack of focus, constant reprioritization, and micromanagement creates vast inefficiencies and stifles autonomy. A queue of people, literally and figuratively, line up for Siebel's approval for anything from whether or not to buy lunch to the details of an RFP. Many meetings are either canceled after the fact, or delayed quite a bit as a rippling effect from the top down. - Because many executives come from big company backgrounds, even though C3 is a relatively small company it has big company heirarchy, tools and policies. While these may be necessary at larger companies, they come with large costs to culture and efficiency. - many of the practices at both the executive and engineering level are outdated or not suited to the current line of business. It's a bit of a time machine back to the days when: - waterfall-style software building was The Way software was built, and no alternatives were considered feasible - Big (aka expensive, aka proprietary) platforms were The Way, instead of smaller isolated services built by autonomous teams. - management at technology companies was considered necessary and important to motivate and give direction to engineers who, if left to their own devices, would build shoeboxes instead of rocketships - companies often divided employees between the "thinkers" and the "doers", the engineers being the doers, and there was little cross-pollination - Data Modelers were necessary to protect software engineers from mucking around in the data layer where they do not belong - it was deemed status quo/unavoidable that engineers would/should work long, late hours - automated testing was less rigorously applied - there were few to no options for collaborating well with remote participants None of these things necessarily dictate failure, but they make for a challenging environment