This is not a serious company. The two cofounders started it as a lifestyle company- it exists to promote their personal brands and to provide them an income while doing what makes them happy.
This is something one of the cofounders wants to change- they accepted VC money to build a product that has been stalled for four years now. However the other cofounder as not committed to this.
What this means in practice is that the non-committed Cofounder blocks technical development unless it makes him happy. The team as a whole is completely disregarded, as the only priority is the cofounders personal comfort. Some examples include-
* Blocking the use of the standard python typing library (mypy) because the cofounder doesn't want to mess with his VIM configuration. Yes, he actually said this.
* Forcing code standards that the cofounder likes. Despite the entire team, with the exception of the cofounder, wanting to use one model per file he tried to force all of the database files into a single file- again because he doesn't know how to properly use his IDE.
* Refusing to acknowledge security concerns brought up by employees, and trying to force their (incredibly insecure) architectures on the team. Their only justification is that he feels it would be faster, but the extra work ultimately took about a day to do.
* Instead of disagreeing with proposals the cofounder doesn't like he agrees to proposals but then undermines development on them.
* Sexism is a huge issue here. The cofounder regularly treats the non-cis employees poorly. This includes pulling them off of work to handle "grunt work" style tasks. The cofounder explicitly said he was doing this to free up his cis-male employee to work on important things, despite the fact that the team members have the same title and similar qualifications.
On top of this the company has a major problem with honesty.
* The cofounders never disclose their romantic relationship until people are already in the company. People are not comfortable talking with the CEO about issues with the other cofounder because of this.
* They claim to have transparent salaries, but the bands they share are lies. I was personally paid tens of thousands of dollars more than their "highest" bracket.
* They claim to do profit sharing on their consulting work, but they take people off of prodigy teams (their new product) to work on consulting work without sharing profit.
* Further, they actually lecture and ridicule people for not making Prodigy Teams deadlines despite the fact that they regularly pull people off of that project to support their consulting. There's one project that has been stalled for a month, and the cofounder has complained about it regularly- except the developer working on it is also assigned four other projects and the cofounder has done nothing to change that.
* As a last point on the honesty front, the cofounders regularly lies about why people leave. This team has a horrible retention problem- the entire team has already cycled through, and people continue to flee.
The final problem is how the cofounder approaches disagreement. He held a "retro" to find out why a project was delayed, but instead of actually trying to find the root cause of the delays he berated and ridiculed a decision made by a teammate (again targeting the non-cis member of the team). The thing is this decision wasn't that big of a deal- they spent a day working on a proof of concept for a system we didn't end up using. The real delays were due to the cofounder taking them off the project for a week, and because the cofounder didn't follow through on his own task of fixing the logging of a CLI we were using. The lack of logging caused days of effort due to unclear bugs, and ultimately I ended up doing the small refactor myself to move the project along. Rather than acknowledge his own mistakes the cofounder chose to attack and deflect the problems on the team. The CEO was in this meeting and said nothing at all.
