- extremely junior managers who are not capable of pushing back against absurd ideas from "senior" leaders, so instead, they throw team members under the bus.
- thick layer of middle managers, some of whom produce a lot of work resulting in minimal business impact, while others are more interested in political and social ladder climbing, who mostly all, for whatever reason, seem to face few checks and balances on their work or behavior
- a great deal of nepotism and favoritism. Leaders will bring in friends, regardless of the capabilities of those applicants.
- as others have said, there seems to be a very limited culture of promoting from within, or rewarding hard work
- one of the most inefficient go-to-market sales and partnership teams I have ever witnessed. So much internal time wasting and wheel spinning. Despite the massive pool or resources and hiring power, senior leaders are wasting resources with inappropriate direction (if any at all) to their very qualified team members. Other times, direction is given with almost no runway, and team members are made to jump through ridiculous hoops which ultimately yield no results anyway.
- I personally witnessed 5 people get "laid off" or let go for pushing back against ineffective and unrealistic decision making
- goal setting seems to be quite unrealistic, and based on hopes and dreams rather than proper predictive metrics or rev ops data. This would concern me if I was considering joining in the go to market team in any capacity.
- the product itself seems to be well liked, although new iterations and product releases are confusing, even to internal team members. Lots of buzz words and verbs used to describe the new products without actually explaining what they do, who will benefit from them, and how much they cost, for example.
- poor internal cross functional communication on larger scale initiatives
Apart from my skepticism on the business outlook, most importantly, working here every day became increasingly stressful, as general mismanagement of resources, poor or complete lack of decision making and wheel spinning, and the resulting blame shifting, utterly obliterated my self confidence and my sense of worth. What's worse is, it seemed that making efforts to enforce material change and drive new initiatives in-order to overcome the management paralysis I witnessed only worsened the backlash from managers, who apparently felt threatened by these efforts. Things became so bad that going to work made me feel sick and anxious every day - after debriefing with four other colleagues who left, they all described the exact same experience. Since leaving, my mental health and sense of self has slowly returned.
- I question the business's outlook based on regular and last minute changes to the strategy from senior leaders
- I question business outlook based on seeing the behaviours of a relatively inexperienced go-to-market leadership team
- my personal experience, and the experience of several others adjacent to me, was debasing and demoralizing
For these reasons, I cannot recommend joining 1password, and sincerely wish I had avoided it myself.
