Upper Management Suffocating A Great Concept
Pros
• The benefits are pretty good. • If you know how to negotiate, you can get pretty decent pay. If you don't negotiate you -will- be underpaid.
Cons
• Too much internal self-promotion at the expense of real results. • We used to make a game out of counting how many times the CEO Josh Luber name dropped during company-wide meetings. • It seems that the CEO is more interested in becoming a celebrity and having a business that appears to be successful than running a successful business. The proof of this is how our "hyper growth" was measured in how fast our staffing numbers are growing rather than our profits and user-base. • The CEO never bothered to talk with his employees or genuinely listen to their ideas and concerns. It’s like he saw us as lower than him. • No-one ever addressed real problems in meetings, it was always “StockX hype!”. If problems were brought up, other departments and “lack of time” were routinely blamed when the real problems were misguided or outdated practices. • Upper management sabotaged teams by spreading them too thin with artificial deadlines due to a lack of trust and wanting to keep up with the joneses on features that were flashy but didn’t help retain our customers not even one bit. It did nothing but cause anxiety, confusion and oppressive discombobulation among teams. • Upper management consistently tied middle management's hands behind their backs with micromanagement. The proof is in the pudding when you look at how much turnover there is in middle management. • They measure your performance by time-at-desk. “Heroes” that stay late slapping bandaids on the fires created by bad practices are routinely glorified by upper management in company-wide meetings and given promotions while the people who quietly prevent the fires from happening in the first place go un-noticed or even mistreated because they don’t appear “dedicated” in the ways they’re looking for. • Upper management would choose a strategy that drives the company to it’s death if the strategy is either trendy or makes them look good.