Pros
Great coworkers, great bullet points for my resume. I really like the new location although it's in an older building an a notoriously dangerous city, the weather is unbeatable, restaurants around it are less than mediocre. But I really liked the change to the new location despite the fact it destroyed my commute time. I think for what it was, it was a great location.
Cons
CEO needs to step down for the sake of the company. I no longer have a stake in the future of the company, and it's been long enough since I've worked there that I can leave a review with clarity. But my former coworkers, I still care about and I will state my opinion freely so things might improve for them. This is going to be a review of Shira, the CEO. Please see below for the reasons why. Anecdotal proof is provided to back up my major points. Conveniently for the points I'm making, her review of the company titled 'Anonymous Review' on August 25th exemplifies one of the problems. She is using a Glassdoor review to criticize the anonymous critics and doing so anonymously in a moment of hypocrisy. You can clearly see the me versus them stance she has taken in this. She liked to say that her door is always open, but if you ever said anything to her that she could remotely take as personal, she will. She is open to ideas as long as they are hers. If you don't like the idea, you are somehow disqualified because [most convent reason- doesn't have to make sense]. Exemplified in the review previously mentioned, the opinions offered in criticism of her are disqualified because the former employees quit or were fired for cause. I only know one or two people who were fired 'for cause' (an ambiguous descriptor that could mean as little as he disagreed with me out loud- they used the 'at will' employment clause meaning anything's 'for cause'). But that doesn't somehow disqualify their points. There's no meaningful connection between her reason and her conclusion. She is arrogant. You might say, she's allowed, she's the CEO. She once tried to do the engineers' job and ended up botching job after job, creating more work for the engineers when they had to go back over her work and correct it. This created problems in production and the engineers would jokingly tell the poor guy who caught the mistake to go to her for the correction knowing full well they would not. She micro manages. What kind of CEO does that? There was no head of sales, no head of engineering and no head of customer service for a while unless it was convenient to place blame. There was no chain of command. She had her fingers in everything. One oft repeated saying of hers was 'what's going on with the queue?' She would ask the engineers this so that she could give them the appearance that she was paying attention, but if they tried to give her a comprehensive status update, her eyes would glaze over because in her mind, you're just giving excuses for how bad an investment you are for getting paid. She took every opportunity to say whatever personal jab she could to cut you down to your face or behind your back. She often called the engineers 'draftsmen' in an ignorant effort to denigrate them. I say ignorant because historically, draftsmen are highly skilled and highly paid. But the intent was there to belittle the engineers. One time, she brought her 6 year old to work and after introductions, the 6 year old said to his mom, 'are these the guys whose jobs I can do?' She was using her child as an insult to the engineers behind their back. It went beyond attacking groups to taking jabs at people. I think it was an attempt at humor and since it was personal, I'll leave those examples out. But the nature of the jab left the people hurt. She ran the engineering department like a sales department. It's my assertion that she believe that you can have a turnover rate in the engineering department like is acceptable for a sales department. The result was a poorly run department with less than minimal documentation, lots of tribal knowledge and nobody there for longer than a couple years. (You can guess, I was an engineer.) She makes policies and then abandons them. If it hadn't been happening at my expense, it would be comical. Literally the same day a policy was set to no longer do 'take off's' a job comes in and we asked her, 'what about this one?' Just do it was her response in a nearly dejected voice. She wouldn't take the stand for her organization, at least in this instance, and tell the customers to do their jobs. She often employed her own husband's company. I hesitate to bring this up because I like the guy. He's a really cool guy. But in light of her hiring his company to do work, she also purchased for the company product from him that is redundant to several free services commonly used in its place. It's unethical at least. She chases out great employees who would be considered unequivocally great employees at another company and then bad-mouths them after they're gone. One such employee found his unique job posted as an opening at Architectural Lighting Works. He quit after that. He was extremely knowledgeable, personable, easy to work with in general. She had the opinion that he bit off more than he could chew. The person that occupied his role had been chased out before him. I never met him, but I only heard good things about him. She steps over a dollar to save a dime as the adage goes. In an effort to save money, she had a product developed for internal process. It took a few years of a developer-contractor working with one of the employees to develop a product that we could have purchased. Another example, she paid her engineers so poorly that turnover was rampant. The company depended on tribal knowledge, but wasn't willing to keep the employees necessary for that strategy to be successful. The engineering department was struggling to keep up with the menial tasks piled up on them that they couldn't take a step back to develop their own processes. Neither did the department have a real department with a budget or someone who would be responsible for the budget. We also had directors with nobody to direct. As you can see, none of these points are related to the move to the new location or traffic. I would venture that these points will be dismissed as the rant of a discontented ex-employee. I deeply care about the remaining people there. And if what I say can make a difference for them, I'm more than willing to talk about it. I don't want to venture too far into the cause of her inadequacies, but I believe her behavior and mannerisms stem from her multi-pronged lack of self esteem. She is smart and someone with her ability is capable of running the company successfully. So why isn't this happening? I believe her previous role as head of the sales department gave her a false confidence in her abilities in general. She has no kind of education that has prepared her to her current role. And since criticism is an affront to her authority, rather than an opportunity to grow, all her brainpower goes into defending herself. The biggest reason she's still in her role, in my opinion, is her background in sales. She can adequately spin a situation so that it's not her fault to the board. For example, she will probably explain all these reviews coming out that we're all angry about being forced to move to Oakland. Or it's the open office environment. But none of those apply to me. I was OK with all of it. I'm generally an easy guy.