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Toxic blend of cronyism, favoritism, and mediocracy - Senior Software Engineer Castlight Employee Review

1.0
Apr 15, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Convenient office location with a view (management get seats with views, engineers are in the back). Most of the rank and file are professional and hard working, and there is a friendly atmosphere.

Cons

Cronyism. Promotions and bonuses go to the besties of the VP level, typically to loudmouths and bullies. Rank & file team players get ignored except for being expected to hit ever-shorter deadlines. CEO seems to not have a strategy, in a recent public interview he looked like he was out of his league. Embarrassing. Despite endless talk of accountability, it never seems to apply to Senior Directors and above. For example, CSLT stock is currently near a 2 year low (despite the rest of the industry sector going gangbusters) so ... we gave the leadership team a huge round of promotions. Say whaa! Promotions and full bonuses go to buddies of the in-crowd. Beware if you are considering your full bonus part of your package, unless you are good at managing-up. It's hard to see any correlation between promotions and competence. There's no discernible strategy, unless it is to cut costs by doing more and more development overseas, while asking all developers to "act like startups" and do more work. BEWARE if you are a technical woman: the sexism is flagrant and no-one seems to care. Joining engineering is like going back in time 20 years. Some teams do CI, some don't. Laughably painful monthly manual production deploys. Unwieldy ball-of-mud SOA "architecture" that badly needs some actual architecture. The QA management claims to be "scalable" by asking the team to only do automation, not to actually look for bugs. Engineering is explicitly hierarchical: decisions are made at the top, the troops are given orders, and leadership does not explain decisions. Inputs from the troops are neither valued nor asked for. Ivory tower architects, who seem otherwise unemployable, make wide-ranging decisions on technology. The end result is both predictable and either hilarious or tragic, depending on your point of view. Mediocrity is rampant and it seems to be accepted, good engineers tend not to tolerate it for long. R&D is on consecutive death marches, always to met some new deadline so there's never time to address the ever-accumulating tech debt (except for talking about it). These deadlines are always vaguely defined bet-the-company deals which don't instill confidence in the "leaders". Engineering leadership is technically lightweight, and replete with Dilbertesque people managers pushing people to "do more" and bullying them into toeing the line.

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Castlight Response
8y
—This message is posted on behalf of Neeraj Gupta, SVP of Engineering at Castlight— We are sorry to hear that you left Castlight with this opinion as it does not represent who we are. Many Castlight leaders are women—we are well above industry average in that regard and will continue to ensure gender equality and representation. Ingrained in our culture is respect for all employees, and bad behavior such as bullying or sexism are simply not tolerated. All executives are open to feedback and we also offer an anonymous feedback form; we encourage all employees to speak up honestly in a safe environment. Our Engineering team is a very high-performing group that has successfully helped Castlight meet our customers’ needs for the timely delivery of their health and wellness products. We recognize that meeting these demands can be challenging for engineers at times. Indeed, bonuses reflected their hard work and were directly commensurate with individual performance. The team uses one of the most modern technical stacks in the industry, including Angular 5, Ionic, Spring MVC, Docker, and Kubernetes. With a focus on excellent project management/delivery and rigorous QA, the team cannot change its tools every time a new one is released to market; instead, we must focus on quality and consistency. As One Team, we are all striving toward not only pleasing our customers and improving their lives, but also enabling employees to grow their careers internally and of course providing competitive compensation. Every individual at Castlight—not just the CEO—contributes toward our success. With our Engineering team’s significant contributions, we accomplished another critical milestone in the slow-moving healthcare industry to achieve our mission.

Explore other reviews about Castlight

5.0
Jun 13, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

great coworkers, amazing leadership and fun office

Cons

not a lot of negatives. company was a mature startup

1.0
Sep 5, 2024
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Castlight Health is a brand under apree health, not a company anymore. The CEO is not Maeve O'Maera, This page is misleading. Castlight and Vera Whole Health merged to form apree health but are still operating under their brand name.

Cons

Executive leadership is toxic and has completely destroyed the company drove out the leadership that actually deserved to be there. Private equity company took over and are just gutting the company to sell and make a dime. THIS is one of many things that are ruining healthcare.

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