Pros
The other software engineers are generally amazing to work with, but those people will be leaving soon
Cons
No one is safe here. FloQast just did their first (but not last) mass layoff of 49 people (so sneaky, to avoid the WARN Act consequences that kick in at 50 people) and from what I hear from those laid off, they handled it terribly. Some shared that they weren’t ever contacted by video or phone call but were suddenly locked out while on calls or before they logged in that day, and received an email hours later, way after we were told that everyone had already been contacted. They were not even able to say goodbye to us. The ceo and the vp of HR held a scripted all hands meeting where they said this was not a layoff, but a “restructuring.” Come on, you know those aren’t mutually exclusive. Mike and Adey, do you really believe your own words? How many times did you practice that line in the mirror before you could say it to hundreds of people without stuttering? It’s so disrespectful to the families whose lives you’ve disrupted. This is a company who specifically claim authenticity and integrity in their core values, or used to at least. They are shaking in their boots about the word “layoff” being passed around inside and outside of the company, lest they face accountability and the consequences of their choices. Take the rating that you see here and disregard all reviews prior to 2023. It is simply not THAT FloQast anymore and it’s not going back to it either. On top of that, it’s likely that they made the laid off employees sign some agreement to not talk about their experience, so take that rating and divide it in half, and that’s a way more accurate representation of reality had people not been silenced. There’s not a single employee I’ve talked to that isn’t looking for an exit, including me. Once the hiring market opens up soon again, you’ll start to see more of a mass exodus than has already started. Last year’s external SVP of Engineering hire and this year’s fundraising round puts the control in some very questionable hands. The new direction is to essentially become a consultancy for extremely large accounting firms, who have learned that they have this power over the org now and love to throw their weight around with threats of canceling if a certain feature that only they need (with dubious ROI) isn’t completed by the date they are demanding. Any medium to small contracts will not get any priority or attention for what they need and are better off churning to competitors honestly. Here’s how FloQast will treat you: - Announce a hiring round of 100 new engineers and give out promotions the week after the layoff. They want to hire mostly cheap junior engineers, and/or… - Management may also be quietly exploring offshoring or contractor alternatives for development work, allegedly - Cut entire teams who have large scope and put all that work on your team that already had massive scope - Specialized engineers (security, sdet, devops, etc) are being drastically reduced, but the work still needs to be done - by you, with little to no training - Reduce the amount of Seniors across the board (design, product, engineers), so you won’t have the help or expertise that you need - Hold you as an engineer accountable for arbitrary and ridiculous revenue goals for each quarter. Why engineers? - we don’t choose what gets worked on. If you don’t meet the revenue goals, they’ve insinuated the whole unit of cross functional teams would get fired. Even if you meet the goals (but not surpass them by a lot), you’re in the yellow, with them insinuating the unit is in danger of getting fired the next quarter. - Make random and absolutely unreasonable deadlines for an insane amount of work, without consulting the engineers doing the work - Make managers track the points you have completed and rank you among all engineers in the org - Track all of your work and hound you about why you haven’t done work that’s outside the scope of your team - Non-billable work, like mentoring, pair programming, code reviews, infrastructure work outside the scope of your team that’s now your responsibility are entirely overlooked - Fire people quietly, never announce it, probably make them sign agreements to not talk to anyone about it, and then weeks or months later you’ll go to message them, and their Slack profiles are deactivated. They never even announced the names of the 49 laid off; we had to go Slack profile hunting that day to try to piece that info together. They love severing the relationship with an employee and doing their best to make sure those people completely disappear from other employee’s minds, quietly sweeping them under the rug. We're forming communities of current and former employees outside of the workspace to try to undo this effort. - Make promises about stock options that they then take back, allegedly - Move you around to various teams without giving you a choice - Switch your manager frequently, so that you have a new one every few months - Explicitly state that you might “need” to work nights and weekends - Cut all tools that make your work life easier Do not take their word anymore. They are not good people who care about their employees. Were they ever? I don’t know, this last year has me questioning that… From one worker to another, I hope you take this info seriously - and disregard recent high ratings obviously made by management - to make an informed decision about whether you should join this company, or stay. Their worst nightmare is employees talking to each other, and that’s where our power is. Ask for your coworkers cell phone numbers and chat about what we’re experiencing, outside of company channels of course. Reach out to the people laid off, in solidarity. Make an exit plan. Best of luck out there.
