- It's clear that leadership does not prioritize or value diversity & inclusion. The employee demographics are overwhelmingly white and male, which kind of makes sense if you look at the C-Suite. While there were "women in tech" lunch & learns, the speakers were almost all white. There is zero understanding of what intersectionality is and why it matters. In addition, they put out the most useless "statement" surrounding BLM a few weeks ago, but only shared it on LinkedIn (arguably one of the lesser-used networking sites), where it promptly got flooded with comments from previous employees commenting about their negative experiences at the company. You also can't even find the blog post on their site without a direct link.
- I totally drank the Kool-aid. I took a pay cut to work here because you become conditioned to think "we're a lean startup, of course we're not going to make a lot of $$! It's just an honor to be a part of this company!" Meanwhile there are engineers and PMs that easily make 3x more than most of the employees. Measly raises are seen as "a big deal, we never give people this much, you should be proud"
- Enter Covid-19. We were advised that we could start working at home on March 2. Around 2 weeks later we had our usual all-hands meeting where the CEO proceeded to tell everyone how we were in a great position to survive the pandemic because we had $100 million in funds. By March 31, 41% of the company was let go and 9% were furloughed. I think it says a lot about the state of the company that they couldn't even last 1 month without having to take such a drastic cost-saving measure.
- In between March 2 and March 31, they let promotions and raises go through and gave us an extra $100 to buy additional WFH equipment. Why on EARTH would you approve stuff like that? Not to mention, most of the people that had just gotten promoted were promptly laid off 2 weeks later. There were no conversations between leadership & employees asking if people were willing to take paycuts or voluntarily leaves. It was simply "bye, you're gone."
- They are paying our Cobra premiums until October, which is great, and severance was paid out depending on tenure. And yes, they let us keep our laptops, but let's be real - this was probably the most operationally efficient thing to do in lieu of trying to get people to send their laptops back to an office that is/was locked due to stay-at-home ordinances.
- The cherry on top of everything: according to a recent Geekwire article, Rover received a $5-10 million PPP loan that was approved 2 weeks after layoffs :)
