Where to start? The executive management team blows my mind weekly and not in a good way. There is little to no confidence across the dev teams that the current team (CEO / COO) can actually scale the business in any profitable way. A big driver is the management team can’t seem to decide if we are a SaaS company, a consumer portal (that was a fun time - google VendorAlley & Remine), a brokerage firm selling leads(?). Honestly, what is the vision because I can tell you several folks do not understand what the endgame is.
Transparency: you can forget you ever get this from the executive team. Very recently, our Chief Legal and Finance VP left the company. Office gossip is office gossip so I won’t speak to the rumors. However, the issue was brought up at the last all hands meeting and literally no explanation was provided. It was brought up and immediately dismissed by the CEO. These two execs were there one day and suddenly gone. They weren’t fired (we know that much). Many of the employees actually viewed these two execs as the adults of the company and were a thermometer for the company.
Feedback: the feedback process is a joke. The bright side is our new HR VP seems to be doing her best to actually make a decent environment for voicing issues, assisting in managing the company, etc. It seems though that the executive team only want to manage through firing employees like it’s an addiction. Countless employees were dismissed with no prior discussion on performance or even put on a PIP to correct any issues. That isn’t how any company should be managed. I understand if there is an immediate issue and an employee needs to be dismissed. The majority of the time no reason is given and that is a huge turn off for recruitment.
Work-life balance: you may get lucky and be assigned to a team that only works 8-5 M-F. Unfortunately, I was rewarded for being excelling at my job by being placed on the “A+” team which led to working 80-90 hours each week for about 3 straight months. I reached a new level of exhaustion were wired in on a Monday and woke up on a Thursday. No idea what happened in between.
Equity: this was a disaster. Close to 200 employees were given offer letters that stated we could vest in shares of the company. Then the documents we were given stated something completely different that the management team couldn’t explain to the employees. Luckily, the Finance VP was more than willing to have long conversations with several employees to explain the mechanics of the equity. I know that Chief Legal and Finance VP worked for several months to try to make employees while through tradition stock option grants, but it really should never have got to this point. Even worse is that the options are way out of the money and there isn’t any indication that’ll change in the next year. You can honestly go to most any other tech company in this area and get better equity packages from day 1. It’s hard to stay motivated for lower than average pay (in the area) and equity that is worthless.
