Leadership cultivates a culture of toxicity. - Software Devloper II FluentStream Technologies Employee Review

However the same cannot be said about their CTO, Chief of Staff or Director. The CTO is European (my bringing this up will make sense in a moment) and is very opinionated technically and politically. He will often change the direction he wants a project to go, seemingly at least once a week. Giving the feeling that he just read about “a cool new thing” and that should be the focus, until he reads a different article and wants to put a full stop and use this “other new thing”. Redo the work, but the expectations for a deadline haven’t moved. He also enjoys having weekly meetings where we all “hangout”, but by “hangout”, I mean he likes to find a topic and assign that topic to an employee to present to everyone at the next meeting. These are not “work” things. It might be things like: * “why does the US use the Imperial system, instead of the Metric system” while he then provides commentary during the presentation about how “dumb Americans are”. * watching a movie (on your own time) and then present a book report style synopsis on said movie. * Or use the time for “discussions”, Ranting about one employee’s shirt choices for having the American flag visible on the shoulder, saying “Those who enjoy flags, don’t deserve them” ironically while flying the Union Jack behind him while saying such. * Or finding one employee who drives an old truck (because it was cheap to buy, he put a lot of work into fixing it and understanding the inner-working to keep it running). But it doesn’t matter what you can afford, you should be buying a new EV and you're a horrible person for not doing so. Pushing colleagues to jump in on the bandwagon of shaming that individual, in order to "align" with the CTO. Their Chief of Staff would sit in these meetings and just nod his head instead of stepping in, when employees were visibly and obviously shook. I say this not because I felt that they were but because the majority of us would often all talk “off the wire” about how uncomfortable it was but often default to “we just need to play ball” to keep our jobs. During the height of the BLM movement we had an interview with a potential employee. He saw one of our employees mentioning BLM in a status. The interviewee said something to the effect of “I can appreciate it and understand it, but it's all over the place and a bit of sensory overload. I really just want a job where I can focus on work”, he was not hired and in our debriefing there was a lot of “he is probably a racist” don’t you agree? We don’t want “those people here”, do we? Where the options you have are to agree or appear to be a problem. Some folks apparently don’t understand that you can be for something and still be overwhelmed by it. The Director when promoted to this position became very much a “I was promoted here so I must be the smartest person”, but much like the CTO can’t be bothered to make meetings because they are too busy hanging out and chumming it up. But when deadlines get missed, it falls back on the developers.