Unauthentic leadership brings bad culture. It is apparent in this company. Leaders keep saying they are “trying their best” to build the best culture, but their actions speak otherwise.
There are obvious reasons why many executives and great engineers left in the past two years.
The recent reorg laid off many amazing colleagues who were essential to the company. Many of them are more competent than some of those who remain. They blindly removed people based on their titles and perceived responsibilities. Every team’s QA and program/project managers perform different functions. The managers and teams were not consulted before taking this action. It is very disheartening. Those on the list who wanted to stay were shoved over to an acquisition that also lacks decent corporate culture. If it wasn’t for COVID, people would be leaving in droves right now.
The so-called single-threaded leadership at the company level is seriously flawed. The FANG way of single-threaded leadership means something completely different than what is being done at SoFi. We seriously doubt the senior leaders’ judgment in nominating boastful people who have no humility but do have bad track records to lead product engineering.
The louder one has to brag about how great one once was as an engineer, the less great one probably was and it shows that one is merely power-hungry and insecure.
It is also puzzling why we keep hiring people who have no industry experience for leadership roles. Often times these people come from big tech without any other experience (never worked at or had their own startups). Working at smaller companies means you have to be hands-on and not just talk and sit in meetings all the time as in big organizations. The products are nothing innovative compared to other players in the field. All these products keep giving away free money to attract low-quality customers. If it’s wasn’t for COVID and newbie investors being stuck at home trading stocks, these products would not have had much chance gaining momentum. It feels like they just want the signup numbers to look good, as one of the ways to facilitate the much-desired IPO asap.
The only thing SoFi does differently is spending a ton on marketing, including the $400,000,000 on naming rights to a stadium. Not sure what is going to happen to that one, since there will be no large events any time soon.
I am moving my money to other banks and brokerages.
