Let's start at the top: the CEO is a tyrant with a practiced talent for smiling and speaking softly, even as he is planning to fire you just because you aren't kow-towing enough or if he simply doesn't like you. HR totally knows this, and while HR does try to take care of regular working people, in the end they bow to the Dictator. A former sales star in his youth with a large corp., he doesn't truly understand tech, new products, or market expansion. He micro-manages everything.
The CEO has used the "bad market conditions" for the past several years as an excuse to the firm's Board and investors to explain slow/no growth, low new customer acquisition, and constantly missed rollout calendars for new product and functionality. It's hard to understand how investors tolerate this given the value increases in the overall equity markets, but they do, perhaps because they know that trying to sell a firm with this kind of poor profile wouldn't be profitable.
The firm makes a healthy percentage of their revenue from audits for old customers, and therefore lean heavily on an overworked and underpaid junior workforce who put in looonng hours being micromanaged to try to make unachievable goals in audits and recovered monies. The CEO is a former salesman who believes in assigning everyone "stretch" goals they can't reach. So called "bonuses" are almost never paid year after year, except for certain sales folks (and the CEO) who "make numbers" by reselling to existing/repeat customers for ongoing service contracts.
They heavily control employee costs. Medical insurance plans are trimmed and employee-paid portion raised each year in order to lower the company's burden for this "benefit". Salary increases are grudgingly given, if at all. Bonuses are unachievable. Paid time off is always under pressure and tightly limited. HR holds employee gatherings that the upper management only fleetingly attend.
Upper Management is a tight little clique directly controlled by the CEO, the company being his personal fiefdom. Outsiders seldom break in, but if someone new enters, they are kept on a tight leash until they prove to be sycophants who follow the CEO's direction without question, which in turn makes them micro-managers as well. Take a look at the VPs and SVPs that left in '16, '17, '18 who were with the firm for a time, their departure tells you that they knew that Apex had a "drag, don't run" fate for the coming years, which has proven true.
