There is a massive clique at the centre of the company comprising uninspiring, immature ‘leaders’ who’re clinging desperately to roles they’re either not qualified for or are overwhelmed by; they slate each other in private and then make nice in public - horrifying to witness.
We have lost some truly awesome people in the last year or so. The way they treated some of those people as they left was shockingly bad - offboarding experience should be as important as onboarding.
Good leaders/managers/staff in general leave pretty soon after joining - it’s never the companies fault.
Leadership don’t accept culpability/responsibility; come to us with solutions, not problems - difficult when you yourselves are the problem!
Didn’t know this until i left/it was pointed out to me; nearly every manager there is in his/her/their first ever management role? Read back through past reviews and see the trend around leadership and it all starts to make sense. The couple of decent managers I worked with have now also left (one of which’s team is virtually all leaving/has left as a result!)
Insistence on merging the two companies despite little visible/tangible benefit for either side and at the expense of more important work (constantly working around tech debt)
Every time there’s a negative glassdoor review there’s a ‘5 star’ review to offset & an internal hunt to find out where it came from/repercussions - heard this via others but I waited till i’d left before posting to be safe!
Half of the leadership team are lifelong friends of the founders - similarly, if you avoid flagging problems & your face fits, you seem to get put into positions way above your competency (learnt about ‘the Peter principle’ after leaving and very much in effect here)
They bought another company last year and are forcing a merge despite the cultures being worlds apart and the parent company barely holding together as it was
No autonomy in engineering; leadership team decide both what we’re doing and how we do it - if you design something they’d do differently you’re going to have to change it.
Closed shop at the top of engineering; too many of them built the core tech concepts so you can’t get them to let go now; the same few people who built it then are still trying to hold onto control which makes it impossible to scale
No real development in the product; feature work is done at customer request but our product team have no vision for what they want it to be beyond ‘themes’; worst thing we did was get a marketing team last year to help - company is currently positioned as #1 but that’s more to lack of competition and they’re a sitting duck for someone to come and usurp them.
No time to breathe, like being in constant crunch mode with PM’s getting flogged and passing it on.
Golden handcuffs for the people who’ve been here forever - they moan about the company/how we work but they don’t/won’t leave?
Toxic, political, backstabbing - just yuck culture now. Took me a few months to see it but it’s there. There’s a lot of talk about culture but there isn’t any consensus on what the company culture is/should be; they lose an awful lot of people (voluntarily) during probation because it’s not as advertised (again, always the employees fault)
Pay rises are a lottery depending on who you report to/who’s with the ‘in crowd’
All the ‘people people’ have left/are leaving, replacements are ‘bums on seats’ with CEO proud of ‘how many we’re going to hire’ and seemingly ignorant of the fact that throwing average people at this mess is only going to make it worse.
Engagement survey results were covered up/not properly shared with us ‘grunts’; even managers got a filtered/tailored view (again, can’t admit fault)
Constant “things will get better” propaganda without any sort of plan/strategy as to how that will happen.
