If you’re debating on taking a job here, I strongly recommend searching your network to try to find someone who has worked than for more than a couple months. This is not the place you want to roll the dice and write off a few bad reviews as people who just personally dislike management.
It is true that the bad reviews are written by people who personally dislike the CTO. It is also true that everyone who works there for 6+months dislikes him. Bad management and disgruntled employees exist almost everywhere. I have never seen anything close to the dysfunction at this place and I never would have thought one person(even if he’s in charge) could create such a negative culture.
You’ll hear the phrase “flat structure” thrown around a lot. It is used as a justification for management’s behavior. If you’re thinking it means empowering engineers, removing unnecessary rules and fostering an open, collaborative culture then you are in for a shock.
If you see the CTO talking to an engineer in his office the conversation is one of two things:
- The CTO is saying something extremely creepy about one of the female employees while the engineer tries to forget everything he is hearing.
- The CTO is telling the engineer about the sinister motives of the other engineers. A secret plan is needed to undermine and discredit these other engineers.
The first few times this happens you’ll probably believe that these other engineers are bad actors and this is the way forward. What you’ll soon realize is that no one is immune to to being the target and the more work you do, the more likely you’ll do something to get on the radar and be a target. The CTO is paranoid and delusional. He believes everyone is out to get him, so the good list and bad list changes rapidly.
The CTO is also a coward, so none of this is talked about in the open. The CTO brags that he gets people he doesn’t like to quit without ever having to talk to them. He calls it his “whisper campaign” and believes it’s a feature, not a bug. An enormous amount of engineers’ energy is spent try to determine the current “web of hate” so that they don’t waste their time building something that the CTO has already determined must fail.
There are 2 paths there. Try to be as average as possible to stay off the radar or try to make good software until you can’t take it anymore.
