- SUPER political and hierarchical. I have lots of startup experience and have never been somewhere where sucking up is so universal and necessary just for surviving, not even looking to climb the ladder. My manager literally told me I had to play politics better to protect my career. Some people drink the kool-aid hard and think it'll save them - those are the 5-star reviews you see here. Rest assured this is a very vocal minority and the rest is silently suffering.
- You may be fooled by how much they talk about their values: they do it a lot to make you think it matters. It's bull: it has absolutely no impact on how they run the organization. They're hollow enough to spin them to retroactively label things, like horoscopes, but in terms of internal organization, there's nothing "neighborly" about how ruthless and insincere people are.
- Inept management, both at middle management and C-level. Priorities can change overnight because some executive hears a buzzword at a conference and decides some team needs to pivot all their resources on that. Managers are petty and thin-skinned; lots of your job will include pandering to egos of those above you.
- Impossible to get promotions. The official policy bars you from promotion within your first year but in practice it takes way longer than that. People (namely women) are under leveled in hiring and are stuck there. Raises don't happen outside of promotions, either.
- OKRs are totally unrealistic. Weekly status updates consistently show a failure to meet targets. Bonus payouts are dependent on success with IKEA objectives, something that only one user group works on, but everyone else's bonus is still at their mercy. For a 10-year-old organization owned by the largest furniture retailer in the world, there's a lot of excuses about how "we're still figuring things out."
- If you're a woman who thinks having women in leadership will protect you from sexism, don't - the women in power care far more about protecting their political capital and relationships with other powerful men than you as a disposable peon. I've seen two people get fired, both women, and word on the street was they were both were sacked because they were unlikable.
- Lots of high-profile turnover. In 2018, TR lost the VP of Engineering, Director of Product, chief architect, veteran senior engineer, and the CTO moved to Spain (but still supposedly works here?)
- Official policy is that work from home isn't allowed but they keep hiring more and more remote folks who WFH full-time, not to mention have distributed teams across the world.
