Pros
• Some customers still like our product • There are worse places to work for
Cons
• Consistent reduction of benefits and worsening work conditions masqueraded as "more flexibility" (reality: we want to save money) or "growing pains" (reality: we don't plan well, and you will pay for it). • In design, there is a lack of trust in individual contributors to do their job - incredibly unproductive and demoralizing oversight of all artifacts produced by the design team. Novel solutions are crushed and seen as "not following consistency," yet the company wants to "innovate" and "be copied by others" (a shallow/egocentric goal) • Utopian opinion of the CEO about how QA works within Engineering and reluctance to set a testing environment leads to a "roll the dice" approach to feature releases, with a couple of embarrassing errors made to production. • Absence of cohesive business strategy, and buzzwords are used as shortcuts for any meaningful or actionable path. • Pure performative approach for getting feedback from employees. Lack of action, follow-through, and accountability. • Employee-hostile behavior towards the remote workforce. • A recent worrying trend of censoring employees (deleting Slack messages!) who dislike the reduction of benefits • Performance reviews are seen as an opportunity to impose writing about company values instead of actual career advancement development. • Lack of honesty / awareness about the state of the product vs competition. • Complete blind faith in metrics (a trailing indicator) as a way to make decisions for the future. Pursuing certain numbers leads to constant spamming in the user experience because some PM needs to get X users to click a button. • Inept leadership that doesn't use the product (or seem interested in doing so) yet has "strong opinions" about everything. • Culture of "throwing things over the fence" when a problem touches multiple areas leading to disjointed and poor solutions. The incentive structure is not aligned to break this pattern.