Terrible neopotism culture. Most senior management just comes from friends of other management. It is clear they do not care about the future of the company, just about their fat bonus checks. Little to no diversity in management as well. About 90% white male executives all from the same industry (mostly same few companies). When I worked there, there was a huge turnover in management which dramatically shifted the culture. They urge product people to write positive reviews (check the few negative reviews. followed by a large amount of positive) while treating staff like trash.
Engineers here are second rate citizens. Post-mortems are blameful and management disregards the opinions of staff. Technical decisions are made by people who rarely, if ever, touch the technical components. New technologies are thrown in randomly because its vouge and "in". One month we are working on a serverless achitecture. Next month its all about microservices in containers. The concept of "agile" is completely lost on them. Constant micromanagement, several HOUR LONG STAND-UPS (half my day was spent listening to people talk about the same thing as yesterday). A project is rarely ever completed from start to finish because of constant pivoting done by management. It is obvious that agreements are made to clients before actually evaulating the workload of staff. Then staff is overworked and is not able to meet those deadlines anyway. At one point the CTO referred to the engineering team as the "bottleneck" during an all hands meeting.
Unfair compensation, had a coworker with 5 years of experience more than myself making about 60% of what I was (he has left since). Promises are often made but rarely followed through. Things like bonuses, promotions, stock options are always "being considered" but never actually handed out. During my time there, they cut plenty of engineers and replaced them with overseas contractors.
I was forced to participate in weekly deployments (aka sh*tshows). I would be up until 3-4 am, be required to come into the office the next day but not actually do anything on these deployments besides watch a screenshare of engineers fumbling around trying to update applications on our stack poorly running new (cobbled together) technologies. I would try to sit down a do my work, but with the contant requests with little pushback from my manager and meetings all day, it was nearly impossible. At one point I recieved complaints that my work was suboptimal. However that seemed to just be management cracking the whip. A month later they probably saw that I was checking out, as I had random scheduled interviews from my manager, skip manager and executive in engineering telling me how "I was critical and they really appreciated my quality of work and dedication." I had several managers tell me they though my work was great and that they weren't the ones who originally thought I was a poor performer. They also asked me to talk to them before I decided to move to another company, which I was not dumb enough to fall for. There is also no HR department to speak of so good luck with any sort of work issue.
Its a shame to see what a contant turnover in management can do to a company I once enjoyed working for and really believed in. Would NOT recommend working here for sure.
