Pros
- Employees are generally great to work with. Smart, thoughtful people who are socially conscious and want to make a difference in the world. - Decent benefits (good health insurance and unlimited PTO if you remember to take it).
Cons
- Senior leadership and C-suite were incompetent and out of touch. They were unable to provide straight answers to direct questions, and made it clear on multiple occasions that they were clueless about the work their employees actually did and what's important to employees. - Changes were made to departments without thorough planning. You'd be given a new position with no job description or discussion of salary, and if you asked about those things, management would be surprised that you're concerned about it. New initiatives were taken on without planning or thought behind the resources it actually takes to execute those initiatives and how those new initiatives impact existing work. I can't count the number of projects I started and had to abandon because I was assigned to a new role or the department was being completely reorganized. Again. - Big talk of valuing and wanting to invest in employees without any tangible results. Turnover remained high and you were lucky to get anything above a 2% "cost of living" raise year to year while leadership bragged about how much money the company was making and were going out to expensive steak dinners. - No apparent strategy for retaining talent. They've let decades of combined experience and institutional knowledge walk out the door. They didn't seem to understand the impact that has on other employees and their ability to support products. They also never directly addressed the turnover issues or provided a strategy for retaining employees to stem the loss of institutional knowledge. - Leadership seemed more concerned about superficial changes like renaming departments and using empty corporate jargon than about substantive changes to address the real challenges of their workers. - When I brought up legitimate concerns to the CEO about how Neon could be improved he brushed them off saying he "preferred to focus on the positive." A clear signal that he doesn't actually value the thoughts or input from his employees despite always bragging about how smart everyone who works there is. - Always expected to do more with less. Some products were given almost no resources, attention, or leadership and management seemed baffled when those products weren't performing well. Again, employee suggestions on how to improve products based on interactions with users were dismissed. - Vacant positions were left open for months (sometimes over a year). The hope from leadership seemed to be that the people left will pick up the slack with no extra pay or re-prioritization of responsibilities. Constantly trying to combine positions and force extra work on employees. Pretty much everyone was overworked and significantly underpaid. - Stopped having regular all-staff meetings where staff could ask questions to leadership live, and instead did quarterly update videos that provided no real substantive information. In those videos the CEO would usually "answer" one or two softball questions with corporate jargon word salad that didn't actually address the question.
