MUST READ: Why it didn’t work out for me. I declined my severance to be able to share my story.
The company is ruthless about firings, disorganized, is not intentional about how to best build the product, and as a whole I did not feel cared for as an employee (though there were some genuine moments of care). Some people genuinely have a excellent time here and I sure wasn’t one of them. My best understanding is that if the CEO likes you, it’s fine and fun. Context: Santa Clara Office, TOTAL team with a 5 day in office requirement. Other teams and locations may have vastly different experiences.
To prospective job seekers, I hope this will be a useful warning as to what’s to come. Even if this is your own only job offer, I would caution against taking it if it’s a bad fit (and I suspect my team is a probably a bad fit for most people tbh). Lasting a few months at a place with a bad fit can be worse than not having the job due to stress, decreased self-confidence, and needing to explain a short tenure to future employers. To current and former employees of the company, I hope you can see the company culture more clearly and either help improve it or leave. Most of you were friendly to interact with and yet the dysfunction ran too deep for it to be enough. Thank you for being kind. I also hope this review saves you all headaches from hiring people who aren’t a good fit. You aren’t bad people, and that doesn’t mean your system is functional.
Why I was excited about joining
The company seemed to value pushback from people. During my visit day after I received the job offer, I saw people disagree openly with the CEO in a way I’ve never seen in other companies. I thought that was super cool. It also had a pretty jokey culture and I wanted to have some more lightheartedness in my day. And young people from the team were talking to customers directly!!! I liked seeing that people had the opportunity to be on the ground talking to people (seemingly exec people with decision making power) who will use the product… like woahhh. But it ended up not working out for me…
Ruthless Firings and My General Lack of Psychological Safety
The first week, the CEO was talking about a 1 star glassdoor review whom he identified as the person he fired, and told the rest of the company to give the company 5 star reviews. And the 5 star reviews came (and yes, I do think some people genuinely like working here). The CEO mentions firing often. Various stories of people getting fired, including a story he shared about a personal friend of 20+ years who was at the company because they didn’t care enough about the product and said he didn’t deserve the severance. Did you ask if he was …burnt out? If not, the past can’t change, but I wish for you to be kinder and know you have it in you. Then there were casual mentions of people they are thinking about firing. I heard a firing from the CEO’s office while working. Also glorifying people working long hours. Someone who stayed overnight designing things for the company. Joking about a person leaving after 5pm saying it’s still day time in Hawaii. I personally found that pretty distressing. I felt pressure to stay at the office for long hours, and for a reasonable proportion of the time, I was the last to leave. My understanding of the research is that psychological safety is super important in a workplace, and I have a hunch that for most people, leadership talking this often about firing, and even joking who’s getting fired next at a dinner event is not great for psychological safety. I personally got fired for poor work performance even though I tried putting in work and though I can kind of trace back why it made sense (like it’s obviously not a good mutual fit and they can tell), there weren’t any obvious warnings. I was working late the previous night thinking I’d finish up my work later and the next day I got completely locked out of my messages. Just a few weeks back the team lead said that he appreciated me and wanted to keep me. Did I miss some warning signs? Maybe, and my personal experience remains that I was very caught off guard by this. And recently, I heard that a former coworker got fired. Most people at the company seemed pretty chill with the firing threat. I don’t know how they even handle this, and you know by reading this whether or not this will suck for you. I guess the plus is that the people who stay really drink the cool-aid and that can be magical in some way.
Disorganized
No proper management structure. For some people it’s a plus because it meant freedom. For me, I want to have my 1-1 check in with my manager each week where I get feedback on how I’m doing. I want progress reports where there was none. I think this would’ve helped me feel more comfortable with how I’m adapting to the workplace. Feedback is important to me. The evaluation criteria was 1) contribution to the product 2) work ethic 3) deep product knowledge 4) no noise. What the hell was noise? I think my current perception is that noise is not doing things the CEO doesn’t like. People were loud in the office and it was fine. People made very politically incorrect jokes and the CEO liked it. In my leadership classes in school they told me that manager 1-1s were super good so I asked for them and they frequently got cancelled and/or he told me to ask my teammates for feedback instead, which I tried to ask on chat but they didn’t always reply. No one seems to have regular manager 1-1 check-ins. I guess check-ins are more ad-hoc because the workplace has a 5 day in office, so people get plenty of collaboration time. We did have standup everyday though. There were so many ways others in which the company was disorganized too. The offer letter sent said I had 48 hours to respond which seemed like an exploding offer, and that was not the case. The benefits letter said that they would have a learning budget and the CEO said no because I didn’t contribute to the company yet and no one knew about the learning budget. The lunches are paid out of pocket out of the kindness of the heart of the CEO. Some people bought that narrative, but I honestly found that sketchy vs. saying that it was a company benefit because something something power dynamics with CEO.
Intentionality Around Building and Coding Practices
I have a much higher standard of coding practices. I want smaller PRs so I can review the code. I want 5 minute fixes to happen in PRs before being merged to develop. I wanted Python version to be pin in a codebase. Tests to be working in develop. What I saw was often 100+ file PRs that I’m not really sure how they reviewed. Architectural decisions being made relatively quickly relative to the scale of the decision. People seemed open to moving towards cleaner code. I think part of the reason they fired me was because I was a bit of a perfectionist and wanted to have comprehensive tests for my code and they didn’t appreciate that I wanted a team wide discussion on git PR guidelines and stuff to make sure we were all on the same page. Good ideas, wrong timing is the vibe that I got from the team. Building features was more important to them which is the tradeoff they chose to me. I was confused because they did say that they wanted to start a pilot and they needed to make the code more enterprise grade, and unwilling to have discussions on git practices? That’s the coding practices piece. Then there were features and it was super opaque as to how features were decided. It seemed like people just thought something needed to be a feature and that I had to build it and I genuinely didn’t know if that was the right feature because I wasn’t the one talking to the customers.
On the things I was excited about
Though pushback seemed broadly encouraged, and people want this to be a low ego environment, but I had the wrong kind of pushback, and the wrong timing. You needed to earn the pushback creds by building some big feature otherwise they don’t value your voice in the room. I cared about processes and culture rather than product features. That kind of pushback is not what they are looking for. If you aren’t satisfied with their processes (code quality for instance), they don’t have that much appetite for discussion around it. They are willing to make some incremental changes. Just not a priority for them. Jokey was funny and also some of the comments ended up being more politically incorrect than I was fully comfortable with. I’m glad there’s some space to express some of that, and it was a bit of a culture shock to me even though some of my social circles lean towards being more politically incorrect. This is probably be one of the most politically incorrect tech company out there. Also, the jokey environment can kind of be used against you if you’re uncomfortable because they can just say that they’re joking. Regarding talking to the customer, that was only really a thing for the same 3 engineers on the team. Yeah, it was not going to happen for me.
There’s a lot more I could say on how the company was a horrible fit for me, but I think this is probably enough to get a sense of whether or not you’ll be in the camp that is a bad fit. I feel like I could be a bit kinder to the company cuz they aren’t bad people, but also I could just have easily written a much more scathing review because it was genuinely hard for me. So why didn’t I leave earlier? I thought I was supposed to hold down my first job for a year or so. I thought that I had a chance at doing good work (they said they wanted more enterprise grade and I like good code quality!) and making allies with my coworkers and getting on the CEO’s good side. Hope that this is helpful for both you as a prospective candidate and as a company for filtering out people like me who ended up being a bad fit and/or considering ways to make it better for more people.
Finding the right company fit is hard. Finding good candidates is hard. Making a good company culture is hard, so ending with a metta phrase for everyone: May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be free from suffering