• Layoffs - 40% of staff were laid off last year to satisfy the board and be profitable by Q1 2023. This was done in several rounds with management promising each time would be the last. The December redundancies were announced by management with seemingly no actual plan as to who/what to cut, leading to 3 stressful weeks of uncertainty and no transparency culminating with bizarre decisions cutting key people from high-revenue teams. • Strategy - some teams are incredibly stressed and overworked from redundancies. “Doing less” is touted around but never seems to happen leading to a pattern of more work being done by less people. • Management - upper management is often quite detached from the day-to-day happenings. Despite an apparent interest in employee concerns (frequent surveys, Q&As during all hands, CEO/CTO in-person visits to offices) nothing seemed to materialise or change from these. We were encouraged to ask difficult questions and feel heard, but only received politician non-answers in response. • “Flat” structure - seems good on paper but is a double-edged sword. Engineers have a lot of autonomy and are told to “do what feels right” but receive little direction to what is commercially useful. It also leads to a lack of official accountability as everything is everyone’s responsibility and companies need a guiding hand to steer things. • Progression - tying on from the previous point, the promise of equality of opportunity and titles is meaningless as an informal hierarchy has formed, all the more difficult to navigate and understand. The CTO is rather political and cliquey and certain people continually get opportunities at the expense of everyone else. There's a repeated line in engineering that people have the "freedom" to move around projects and do what interests them, but new projects are withheld from being publicised and instead fed to specific people via back-channels and DMs.
