Management is confused. Leadership is scarce. Key leaders (CTO, President, others) have left the company and we have concrete plans to not back-fill them. Messages from the top are inconsistent and change every 6 months. THICK layers of management are being installed for a company this size. Nation-building is starting to happen. There isn't a lot of "team fun" anymore (the "EBC High" lasted about 2 days after the event) - people are too burnt out for happy hour or even going to lunch together anymore. Strong indicators of the company being sold. We have lost a lot of people - sales, engineering, executive leadership - and we are not back-filling *anyone*. We are too small to have a layer of corporate management this thick (unless we are being positioned to be sold, which has been denied for months). Everything is about bottom-line now: don't spend too much money on customer's lunches, hire people as cheaply as possible, don't travel unless you absolutely need to, don't do any training if it costs money, don't backfill anyone that leaves. Also, we only hire "A Players" which is great that we have people who are exceptionally talented, but that policy prevents us from hiring junior or mid-career engineers, which causes us to shy away from business deals where our senior engineers cost too much to use. If we had junior engineers we could take the business engagement at a price our customers would pay, and we could help those engineers come up to be senior engineers.
