Great Team, But Toxic Management - Tech Team DoorFeed Employee Review

My immediate line manager is genuinely a good person and did give me a decent amount of autonomy and responsibility and autonomy especially whilst the company was in its earlier stages. That has definitely reduced significantly as time has gone on though and the reality of the failing company has become more apparent to everyone

- CEO works with us in office 5 days a week, and is incredibly unprofessional and irresponsible. He has been known to be discriminatory/racist when at after work drinks, and is constantly lying, making up imaginary metrics about deals and new clients, and asking people to work weekends and late evenings just because "it would be great if we could get this done for monday/tomorrow morning" - Salary is very much below expected/average range, and no benefits or bonus - Very little/no engineering best practices or any defined process. Its all fully scrappy with everyone doing their own thing (which usually is totally random and provides no actual value or direction) - The company brands itself as "powered by AI" and fully "AI native" whereas in actuality AI is barely used, and in the cases where it has been attempted, it badly misconfigured and actually slows things down. The website marketing about AI is completely incorrect.

- The team is friendly enough

- The CEO regularly approaches employees in the middle of the day with new requests and immediately asks when they will be completed. There is effectively no real time management, project management, or task prioritisation. While tools like Jira are used, they are meaningless in practice because priorities are constantly overridden by ad-hoc demands from the CEO, usually marked as “ASAP.” Everything he asks for is treated as immediately critical, regardless of existing commitments. This creates constant disruption and makes it impossible to plan or deliver work properly. - The company is so poorly organised that teams are confused and isolated. People work in silos, often unaware of what others are building, leading to duplicated effort and disconnected solutions rather than genuine collaboration. - The CEO frequently promotes a “ship at 80%”, a DoorFeed value. In practice, this translates to pushing out poorly written, fragile code that may work briefly but is not resilient or maintainable. Without solid engineering processes, the entire platform is built on a weak foundation, and these shortcuts compound over time. - The CEO is an AI evangelist and believes the product should be heavily AI-driven from the outset. Engineers are pushed to implement AI features despite the fact that basic engineering principles, data quality, and system reliability have not been properly established. As a result, AI is treated as a silver bullet rather than a tool, and is layered on top of an already unstable system. - Despite being around for 4–5 years, DoorFeed still operates like an early-stage startup. The product has not matured in any meaningful way. Clients struggle to see tangible value from the platform because it is unreliable and, in many areas, fundamentally broken. This makes it difficult to retain customers or build long-term trust, and raises serious questions about the company’s direction and viability.