Pros
The ICs are some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. They are Carrot.
Cons
Low trust environment—from top to bottom. The worst culture I’ve experienced. Makes the day to day impossible to do good work. Senior/executive leadership has no empathy for their workforce, no new ideas, no sense of direction or vision for our future. Nearly everything is hobbled together at break neck speed without a plan. There’s no time granted to reflect or refactor—only “go faster on this next thing!” It impacts the product quality and our ability to make reasonable updates. They keep cutting and cutting our workforce—incredible people with deep domain knowledge in their areas of expertise—without a plan or understanding of their actual scope. I’ve taken on the work of five FTEs after they trimmed my team to practically nothing. I work 10 to 12 hour days constantly. Their “AI roll out” has been frustratingly mismanaged by our VP. Mixed messaging that changes from one day to the next, no clarity on what projects matter no openness to hear good faith critique on AI slop outputs. We’re expected to keep the same dizzying pace or faster without any opportunity to learn or any protected time to explore. The VP pulls us into “urgent” all hands to introduce this new way of working, professing it’s “not about replacing people” but immediately turns around two business days later to cut a significant portion of an already bare bones team… yikes! We have no metrics on what we’ll be measured on in this “performance culture” and, you guessed it, dear reader, no answers from these leaders either. The huge gaps left by leadership mean slimy ICs turn into opportunists, giddy to shop around your ideas as their own in performative corporate fashion—AI has only made this bad behavior worse. Leadership shares no meaningful direction for the next year at our offsites. Here’s an idea—fire the senior “leadership.” Get people in here with courage and basic empathy for the lives of their human workforce. Replace the CEO! Get experienced leaders with a sense for where the wind is blowing in our market and what makes us meaningfully different from the competition. Get leaders who have an ability to communicate this vision to their team. Or idk, “innovate” by replacing these super expensive failing roles with some generic AI tool and completely flatten the org.