As the title says, upper management is a nightmare to deal with which caused work to be miserable for many different people, the engineering org specifically. People tried to bring up issues directly to upper management with an abundance of detail and proposed solutions but nothing changed. Even the concerns from mid and upper-mid level managers were ignored and they were kept in the dark about major decisions. Upper management did not know how to build a product and could not properly plan the assembly line to construct it. Worse, they did not lean on anyone worthwhile to pick up the slack in planning. The opposite occurred, power was removed from other people. A strategy to get around the lack of planning that I'm sure the CPO thought was brilliant was to get people to work late just for the sake of working late when upper management made sure they just put in their standard 9-5 work day. On top of working long hours, co-workers were blamed for being behind schedule when they weren't the problem, the actual problems all came back to management. Late nights were often avoidable if they had listened to concerns we had months prior and even when there were late nights, they didn't have a plan of what to accomplish with that extra time.
The CTO is a businessman that happens to be the CEO of an outsourcing company that we get some development work from. The quality of the work from the outsourcing company is subpar and has caused many domino effect type bugs for our site and services. This is because their company is only built on throwing bodies at problems and supporting codebases for short periods of time. After a major round of layoffs in the main office, it was announced that the outsourcing company's engineers would be leveraged to replace the workforce that was let go and then some. This happened in direct conflict with what we were continually told, which was that outsourcing company would not be replacing our engineers but that we would be scaling up on getting engineers from both sides. The last time we were told this was by the CEO not even a week before the layoffs.
Upper management repeatedly claimed that the chosen CTO was not a conflict of interest but the facts speak for themselves. The CEO, CTO, and CPO seemed to be the only ones that evaluated the CTO's company. All other input was ignored.
To future engineers, it has been some time since I could recommend working here. Especially if you want to be respected and do fulfilling work.
