Below are my opinions alone.
When I joined, things felt great but now it's like a different place. Management is aware of the severe morale and staffing issues but responds by deflecting and telling lower level employees we have to work harder to deliver rather than addressing the issues in a real way. In a recent meeting, upper management addressed concerns about our attrition rate by implying it is fine because it is below (barely) the national startup average of 25%. However this perspective overlooks that these departures greatly impact our future ability resulting from the loss of deep domain knowledge, these departures disproportionately affect engineering, and that we haven't been backfilling very quickly, if at all.
The place feels like it's always on fire—tons of tasks keep pouring in with crazy deadlines and urgency, making it tough to decide what's important. Management tells us to aim for quality and push back on unrealistic deadlines but also to hustle to meet our commitments, which doesn't add up. So we're buried in emergencies, constant urgent changes, and fixing bugs, barely getting any real feature work done. This company is run as if it is a specialized service provider that caters to a select group of vocal clients, dedicating substantial resources to custom development requests rather than prioritizing the development of a scalable product.
