1. 9 years after launch, the company has no vision statement or statement of values. Co-founders don't know what the company is supposed to do, or be in next 5, 10, 20 or more years. Reaching X million is the goal, rather than being a side-effect. There is no engineering pride in them, though both have a technical background.
2. The company is driven by Finance department. The CEO/CMD is busy chasing money, wherever it comes from. Ex-CFO/Director/Finance Head is busy making sure that bureaucratic rules are in place for penny-pinching wherever possible.
3. Lack of focus has lead to mediocrity and nothing other than hosting infrastructure can be relied upon. Employees are dispirited due to ever-changing goals and most people are running through the motions.
4. The co-founders (CMD and CTO) have differing opinions on most issues and don't speak in one voice. This leads to divergent priorities in teams. They also have separate spheres of influence in different cities, resulting in two big silos.
5. There is no management other than at the Cxx level. So-called managers have no authority with regards to hiring, firing, budgets. The co-founders have not learnt to let go of power and try to control everything, down to the minutest level. The only proper manager was fired and another resigned recently.
6. Hiring is done without evaluating and creating proper JD. The aim is to hire freshers or junior folk who can be paid less and controlled easily. Quality and pace of work suffers due to this. The technical support team in Vellore is being grown by hiring local graduates with only English skills, without any consideration for aptitude or attitude. Nobody ever gets fired from Vellore team despite abysmal technical knowledge and work ethic.
7. There is no appraisal system or process.
8. Workplace is boring since there is nothing happening apart from the job at hand. There are no cultural or technical activities, no get-togethers, no CSR.
9. People hear nothing other than criticism from CMD/CEO who is arrogant and rude. Both co-founders lacks the ability to appreciate people working for the company. People joining or leaving the company are not even informed about properly to the rest of the company, other than a terse email from HR when joining.
10. Lot of time and effort is spent in fixing bad technical choices of the past. Co-founders' knowledge is now lacking due to being hands-off, but they are unwilling to hand over the reigns to technical people below them. In other cases, they take outright bad technical decisions due to complete lack of domain knowledge.