In a nut shell the company is suffering from very poor inexperienced leadership. This of course leads to to poor leaders picking poor staff and not knowing how to train and grow them. They don’t know what they don’t know and they do not welcome anyone advising or trying to help them. The more experienced people are not leveraged enough and have been told to basically stick to what they have been hired for. There is a lot of middle management hired to compensate for poor less experienced hires, I would estimate only 50% of people’s skills are being leveraged which has lead to over hiring and in my experience with start ups a waste of money. The recent layoffs were probably needed but many talented people were let go and the more average folks were kept. I suspect this had something to do with salary ranges.
This company also makes everything too complicated, it’s a simple SaaS model that - with a solid product - should be simple to deploy and support. At this point the over complications are compensating for a product that does not solve a big industry problem. HR was more focused on fun and making friends rather then building an environment that cultivates and grows talent. There are little or no growth opportunities, but this seems to work for a majority of the staff. If I had to characterize most of the employees I would say they are only really doing what is needed to get by, there seems to be no desire to grow or go above and beyond. The lack of overall passion is very uncharacteristic of the typical employees of a start up I have experienced in the past. Summing it up the employees are pretty average, but with the management being so poor I guess that is expected. In my time here I have seen most of the experienced folks leave which at first did not bother me, but as I am seeing more and more I can now understand why.
