Good engineers, no money, poor management that thrives on nepotism - Technical Manager ANPC Employee Review

The company has curated a great team of wonderful people. There is a flexed schedule (make your own hours) which is great for work/life balance

Upper management can be a bit confusing. There is a sort of political environment

Interesting and cool product and technology; all the engineers seem technically very solid, and mostly are quite easy to work with. PTO is decent, winter weeklong holiday is a nice perk.

I cannot recommend this workplace. I've seen a culture (at the highest levels of management) of retaliation, poor top-down communication about big sudden shifts, blaming engineers for failures on the part of management & sales, and more. In the last several years we've had huge layoffs (shortly after a big hiring spree), valuable senior employees fired with no notice and no plan for continuity, burnt through multiple good managers in the last year. In the challenging job market of 2025/6 we've still seen multiple qualified systems, hardware, software engineers and managers resign--which speaks volumes. I have personally seen retaliation (firing) of a good junior engineer in favor of the senior engineer who was harassing the former. Multiple people raised concerns to HR and upper management about this but to no avail. Big struggles to retain project leadership & systems engineers. You must ask yourself why. Recent changes have cracked down on job flexibility (at one point we were assured that this would remain a remote-first company but that has not proved true). CEO generally refuses accountability, while blaming everyone else but himself and then being surprised when good engineers go elsewhere. People seem to be afraid to speak up about things for fear of retaliation. Seems to be good reason for this. Unless the Board takes action and finds a new CEO, I don't see direction improving. Mostly a great team but total failure to appreciate or support them. 'Appreciation' does not mean bringing in food for the team--it means creating a stable environment where people are not afraid of retaliation for speaking up. CEO frequently complains that people are 'not communicating with each other' but it's hard to tell what is meant by this--except that some senior in-office employees seem reluctant to utilize the tools that are provided to facilitate remote work. If you can get past the stress from frequent instability, crackdowns, high turnover and just keep your head down on your work, it can be an okay job for a little while.