A few important ones:
1) Poor management, as pointed out in so many other reviews. People in most leadership positions are where they are because they have been in the company long enough or they suck up to the executive team, not because they possess the skills of a true leader. This results in micromanagement (rather than management), frustrated employees, high turnover, etc. A good portion of the management team is unemployable at any other company (in my humble opinion), and they do not know how a real company operates.
2) No real long-term goal, instead constantly changing targets. Important project decisions made based on executive team's daily mood. A project that is company's number one goal becomes defunct literally the next week. New projects are started without due diligence and cancelled within a few months wasting all the effort spent on them (I saw this happening so many times).
3) Unprofessional behavior. I have observed many instances of people yelling each other in meetings (sometimes even swearing). Any one of these would have resulted in serious consequences for people responsible for this behavior in a normal company.
4) Lack of career development. Promotion decisions are based on favoritism, as simple as that. Salaries are not on par with other Bay Area companies, so it may be a good place to start a career but economically not a smart choice in the long run.
5) High amount of workload, mostly due to poor management and moving targets.
Company's response to these criticisms so far have been: (1) ignore them as growing pains (2) plant fake reviews (3) ask "happy" employees to write reviews (I don't question the integrity of some recent reviews but the good ones are either from the new employees who haven't seen the real deal or from the managers who are actually the source of the problem).
If you make your employees happy, good reviews will come automatically. But seems like HR is focused on making the company look good here rather than changing the toxic culture resulting in these reviews.
