Feb. 2025 - Anonymous employee Forward Financing Employee Review

Please make sure to read recent reviews from 2025 before accepting an offer to get a sense for what the company is like currently. - Culture: The company had a very special engineering culture (and in general), where leaders truly cared about employees and their well-being. Leaders were understanding and empathetic and it created a safe culture of constant growth, mentorship, and learning. People were treated as more than resources, and would go above and beyond to help push projects forward. This created a productive and healthy work environment, where people were motivated to do their best work, to help others, and to grow as engineers. Things have changed with new tech executives (engineering/product), and projects usually feel like "get it done by the deadline, or else". It is putting stress on everyone in the trenches. Morale is low. We're moving towards hiring contractors to get projects done, and I would not be surprised if failing to meet a deadline meant termination of teams/the head of the project. Employee retention has historically been high, presumably due to the positive culture. It is hard to imagine that employees would want to stay at the company with the new culture of constant stress paired with all rushed code produced full-time employees and contractors due to the pressure. The technology is not cutting-edge. It is mostly legacy code. But people stayed for the culture and the team. Without that, it is hard to imagine that retention will stay at the same level. - Work-life balance: New executives are pushing for deadlines and "just figure it out" / "just get it done" mentality, no matter the toll on employees. This will probably start looking like not being able to use the flexible PTO policy freely and PTO requests being denied based on deadlines. Most teams are stretched thin with just a few engineers. We are/were hiring a VP of Engineering, and we have a CTO, to manage a team of 20 engineers. Instead of hiring engineers to cover the extra work, we are hiring for executive level positions. Instead of shifting our priorities to a reasonable amount of work, we are adding more pressure on everyone to work faster and do more. - Career growth: In my opinion, this is no longer a good company to start or grow a career. New executives and the HR team/policies seem to imply that there will be little to no structure around determining promotions and evaluating performance going forward. It feels like there will be little time or care for mentorship and proper onboarding with all the pressure on deadlines. - Reorganization: From my time at the company, there have been reorganizations within tech every few months, including at the senior leadership/executive level. Leadership changes frequently and subsequently, so do the engineering teams and workflows. Layoffs come in waves. - Job security: This is subjective based on what I have seen and felt. There is little to no job security. People are constantly terminated silently, including at the manager level.