Overall, this was hands down the worst professional experience of my career. Totally unapproachable leadership team that micromanages everything and everyone. We never worked on one thing that wasn’t directly an idea of the leadership team. Even our OKRs would get completely rewritten as a to do list and handed back to us. There is no place here for independent thought. Noticeably unappreciative and untrusting. The arrognace projected at you can be insufferable. Routinely interrupted presentations of others to interject their thoughts which made it difficult to present points or ideas. When they asked questions it never seemed like it was to gain insight and came across strictly as second guessing. Zero focus on quality or long term planning, the only thing valued here was getting things done as quickly as possible. New arbitrary deadlines popped up constantly. There are a number of extracurricular activities here that felt like loyalty tests. Company seemed cheap and the office generally felt second rate and maybe a little dirty.
The vibe here is weird and off putting; employee discontent was high and I don’t ever recall a single incident I would describe as fun. In the first month I worked here three peers described the environment as weird, one said it felt like a cult, and all 3 left within the next couple months. I was shocked by their candor. Turnover here is high and it felt like people got fired often. I helped interview a number of people and many declined the offers they were given. This happened more in my time here than the rest of my career combined.
Benefits are abysmal, especially health insurance. If you had dependents, they weren’t covered, and the offerings were generally high copay/high deductible/high premium. The PTO policy here is nonsensical and strictly not employee focused. Employee health and wellness did not feel like a priority at all. They were very weird about working remote before it became the norm despite most of leadership being remote at the time. Openly stated they didn’t want employees to wfh on Mondays because they “didn’t want people taking 3 day weekends.”
That was the tip of the iceberg in terms of the negative behavior I witnessed. One member of the team is abusive and yelled at me in my first week during what was essentially a meet and greet. Another coworker confided to me the same thing happened to them. Not coincidentally this person continued to talk to my boss about me despite me maybe talking to them no more than three times during the rest of my employment. Talked about making data driven decisions, but never made one that I am aware of and, in fact, I saw a peer use data in a meeting to dispel a wild assumption by the leadership team. Leadership seemed stunned and there was very tense silence to end it. This person lost their job later. One member of leadership told an EM that they didn’t trust any engineering estimates on a call full of engineers. This was the same person who always made up new, urgent deadlines. Put on strange performance for the entire company during peak of BLM protests where they gave their perspective and then many of them cried. During this performance one of them seemingly missed the mark entirely and another said something I deemed outright racist. I could go on.
