Great people, great culture, troubled leadership questionable future
Pros
There are awesome people throughout the company (for the most part) who tend to work really well with each other and have a great time doing it. The culture is/was fantastic and most people there very much believe in the company's value of "business in the front, party in the back." The CEO has given a lot of opportunity to hundreds of people to have a job and provide for the well-being of their families.
Cons
The work-life balance for anyone in development pretty much sucks. The CEO values people who work themselves to death, seemingly regardless of their actual productivity. The CEO once mentioned his dissatisfaction with an employee who, by the CEO's admission, was one of the best engineers at the company; the issue was that he worked "only" 45 hours a week. Though good communication ("talk to me, Goose") is one of the company values, it's seldom practiced. Again, this starts with the CEO. For example, before I left there was a big project that involved multiple departments in the company. Instead of calling a kick-off meeting and discussing the objective and planning it as a group, he talked to individual department/workgroup heads and gave each only a piece of the puzzle. Everyone involved eventually came to know of the scope and magnitude of the project as well as the others involved. We met together as a group without the CEO (who wouldn't have shown up anyway) to try and piece together what we had each been told. I wish this had been a one-time occurrence. There are a lot of good, competent people in management, but there are a few who are not qualified to be managers and are not good or even satisfactory leaders. These seem to have been promoted based on convenience or because they were the model, "work-til-you-die-even-if-you're-just-pretending-to-be-busy" types. Many of the good leaders left or were forced out over the last year and a half. What's left is (mostly) a group of yes-men. The CEO can be secretive and manipulative in getting exactly what he wants. He is a very nice, personable guy (unless you get on his bad side) but those qualities, as experience seems to indicate, are conditional and partial. Unfortunately he seems more concerned about maintaining control and majority ownership than he does about the success of the company. The best way to describe this is to compare it to the classic entrepreneurial dilemma where the founding CEO can't see the limitations of his own abilities. Lastly, the CEO and HR apparently went on a defensive earlier this year and started "asking" employees to write positive reviews of the company/CEO, even as internal discord reached all new levels. The end results were exactly what they were looking for--an increase in the company rating from 3 to 4 stars (though it has decreased again over the last month or so) and an increase in the CEO approval rating from 40% to 70% (now 66%). Oh, they wouldn't really ask employees to do that, would they? Well, I was one of those asked to do it.
