- Crazy levels of crunch, stress, and burnout. I worked on the order of 80-90 hours a week to deliver features at this company. After I was employed here, I had to go through significant hospitalization and mental health treatment to recover from the burnout I had at this company.
- Extremely unrealistic product goals. This company tried to deliver big company features with a tenth of the staff it needs to execute. Products that would take months to develop at other tech companies were expected to be delivered in weeks. This lead to dev cycles with many delays, many botched launches, and many prod fires. Instead of engineering and product teams learning collectively from these dev cycles, they would single out particular mid-level engineers involved in the project, fire them, and move on to the next messy dev cycle.
- Old leadership was very junior. Many senior leaders had PrizePicks as their first job right out GTech. Their management style was fratty and political, with many senior leaders unable to give direct, candid feedback to reports without it being elicited from them. I saw several folks have multiple positive performance review cycles, only to suddenly become persona non grata to an exec and get fired the next quarter.
- New leadership didn't understand the DFS industry. New execs primarily came from the video game industry, and lacked the knowledge of how to innovate on a DFS product that had great product-market fit, but was feature-limited compared to other players. It felt like all of their strategy came from the classic video game company playbook: over-monetize customers, and reduce headcount.
