I've been working for SEON since almost the very beginning of its upcoming. I experienced what the company was like when our headcount was only ~20 people and been there when the number of employees almost breached the 300 mark. During this journey, I experienced a lot of positive, but mostly negative things. In the beginning, everything was heavily micro-managed by the C-level, mostly the CTO and CEO. This seemed pretty normal at the time, considering that we could almost fit into one reasonably sized apartment. However, this bad habit stayed with us all along. We had a lot of back-and- forths with the management about our issues but our approaches were turned down almost every single time. Things started to get pretty uncomfortable when we realized that the management is not engineering-focused, which proved to be a huge problem since the company doesn't have anything besides its SaaS product. For a while, I was actually proud of working at SEON but my excitement started to wear down when we had to start lying to interview candidates about what a good working environment we have, so we wouldn't scare them away. As the company grew, our opinions started to matter less and less, and in the end, we were labeled as 'complainers' and 'cry-babies' (we actually received these comments from the management directly) because nobody wanted to take responsibility for what was going on. On the team level, we had a pretty clear idea of what we needed to achieve to keep the product floating at least, but these ideas didn't meet with the management's direction of thinking. All focus was placed on numbers and showing the outside world how great of a company we are. Around the time of my leave, the situation got so bad that the management didn't even admit that we had problems and tried to cover up everything with blatant lies and corporate-sounding nonsense. When the inflation started to kick in in Hungary, we were advised not to talk about 'inflation' because the C-level 'didn't think it exists' and a bit later they even banned financial-related questions on company QandAs, basically not accepting the situation. In the end, the whole thing felt like a marketing machine, selling something it didn't have, doesn't have, and will not have. Besides the overall direction of the company's heading, there are other problems. The previously mentioned hyper-paranoid CTO doesn't trust anyone (this is not an exaggeration). Every process, release, and decision had to include him because he didn't trust any of his employees and their ability to make logical decisions. To put it simply the whole Engineering Department was handled like a group of kindergarteners. The CEO's micro-management didn't hit me directly but I was constantly feeling the effects of it - by this, I mean that we had business goals changing monthly or sometimes weekly. Our focus always needed to be on the next big customer, meaning that we were constantly switching between their scopes every other week. The company didn't have a goal besides 'making a ton of money' and this can really be seen on the state of the product. As a closing note, the most shocking thing in all this happened during my exit interview and this finally put the last nail in the coffin. I explained all problems, and my experiences that resulted in my leave and I tried to be as constructive as possible. As a response, they tried to convince me that everything is fine and the solutions for the problems I'm mentioning should be looked for at our end.
