Diversity: The company claims they are making history in both design and diversity/inclusion/belonging. There were many blog posts and presentations broadcasting this brand both internally and externally. However, when revenue didn’t scale with the number of employees they had hired and the leadership had their first chance to prove that they actually meant what Abstract’s slogan said - Good Intentions are Not Enough - they folded. People of color were strongly overrepresented in those who were laid off. After leadership said their would be no more layoffs, they quietly laid off the remaining members of the People team. Diversity or inclusion hasn’t been mentioned once since the layoffs - when an employee asked an anonymous question about the overrepresentation in an AMA w/ the interim CEO, the interim CEO and engineering leadership attempted to coerce that the person who asked into talking directly to HR, and simply said “nothing has changed with respect to our emphasis on diversity”. That’s clearly not true, and nothing has changed since layoffs - instead of continuing to grow our diverse workforce, jobs have been outsourced to contractors. Additionally, engineering leaders have said approximately “we have trouble hiring women, but we don’t want to lower the bar” - Abstract is not immune to patterns of sexism and racism, and while they are common in tech, they are antithetical to Abstract’s internal and external diversity claims.
Engineering Culture: Struggles to improve the software’s performance are met with more and more micromanaging and micro-analyzing of engineer performance, instead of leadership taking a step back and realizing that the struggles have more to do with an unclear vision and constantly shifting team structure. Trust has degraded between leadership and engineers - for example, individualized metrics (# of coding days, commits per day, etc) were introduced 1 week before performance reviews started, but were still used in performance discussions. Leadership often repeats their “fall in line or get out of my way” mentality and are expecting 10x coders at all levels - even more so during this pandemic.
Remote Culture: Abstract is “remote first” and not all-remote (there is a Gitlab blog about the term all-remote that is worth reading). There is a location hierarchy (those who can be in the SF office at the top) and exec leadership is disconnected from what remote work/communication/collaboration is like because they can preferentially meet in person at the office. Leadership lacks vision to push a more collaborative and inclusive remote culture (and also laid off their Director of Culture), therefore public Slack channels are almost silent; a message or two a day will make regular work days feel like you’re working on a weekend/holiday or at a company without coworkers.
Product: The actual product is extremely buggy and slow. Designers strongly dislike working in the current version of the software daily and it is going to take a lot of work to turn the reputation around.
TLDR: There is nothing special about this company’s culture anymore and the values ring hollow after the deafening silence around the layoffs. It’s just like any other struggling startup in the Valley, probably better to look elsewhere.
