Foley reviews

I’ll address the cons in three buckets. IRRESPONSIBLE AI USE. Foley keeps attempting to be an “AI-first” company, but in practice it often feels like a sad game of pin the tail on the donkey. The mandate that came down from leadership several months ago was simply “use AI every day,” without any further structure, guidance, best practices, policies, or standardized tools. What resulted was everyone wandering around blindfolded trying to figure out how to make AI useful. I’m not anti-AI, and there has been some genuinely good work that the two AI engineers on staff have put forward. Unfortunately, like everyone else, they’re spread very thin, pulled in too many directions, and rarely able to complete one “high-priority” project before another is thrown on their pile. On top of that, adoption of what they’ve built tends to be low due to poor interdepartmental communication (see bucket two). For everyone else “using AI every day,” many of the projects and tools being built duplicate tools that already exist or work that’s already happening elsewhere in the company, making a lot of the effort feel less than impactful. The company did issue an AI policy recently, but it came after months of blindfolded stumbling, and I don’t have much confidence that it’ll move the needle. Furthermore, leadership’s attitude lately seems to be trusting AI over their human employees. Again, I’m not anti-AI, but it needs human oversight, especially in an industry as niche and complex as this one. When years of experience and subject matter expertise are dismissed because Claude gave someone else a different answer, it’s a good way to ensure both work quality and team morale stay low. COMMUNICATION SILOS. Communication between departments is consistently poor, and often communication within departments isn’t much better. Decisions are frequently made in a vacuum with little consideration for how they’ll affect other teams. In particular, Foley has a habit of making executive-level decisions without consulting the people on the front lines who will ultimately have to implement them and understand the practical realities of execution. I almost never experienced Foley identifying and addressing problems proactively. Nearly everything was reactive. Personally, I’d rather prevent a problem than scramble to fix it after the fact when it could have been anticipated by talking to the people who know their functions inside and out, but maybe that’s just me. REFUSAL TO INVEST IN EMPLOYEES. Foley pays well below market average for many roles. They’ve managed to attract some incredible talent despite the compensation, but largely you get what you pay for, whether that’s employee quality or retention. They’re actively driving away people who not only work hard but also possess years of industry and product knowledge that takes a long time to develop. The more institutional knowledge they lose as tenured employees walk out the door, the more difficult it becomes to maintain product quality and a strong customer experience. Pay aside, employees are overworked, spread too thin, not respected for their knowledge and expertise, and continually told to do more with fewer resources. Following the recent round of layoffs, leadership was asked how the work of the eliminated employees would be covered. One executive confidently explained that the company was investing more in AI and hiring additional leadership. If that’s the plan, the organization risks becoming even more top heavy while the people doing the day-to-day work become even more stretched. To me, that sounded like, “We laid off a bunch of people so we could hire a couple more executives.” You can bring in as many leaders as you want and strategize all you want, but without enough people on the front lines to execute that strategy, I have a hard time seeing how the company will be successful