Pros
The industry is exciting and seems to be growing.
Cons
Disclaimer: I was on the GTM team and had nearly zero interaction with the rest of the organization. Which in and of itself is a testament to what my experience was like working here. To call Ashling siloed would be a gross understatement. I experienced near-zero interaction with other teams and the company didn’t even seem to have a basic handle on how to leverage tools like Microsoft Teams. Channels? None. After several months on the GTM team I wouldn’t even be able to recognize a team member if I was standing next to them on a bus. The rest of the company? Forget about it. Where there was interaction, it was surface level. Cameras off. Someone from leadership presenting a deck. Might as well have been watching a pre-recorded video. Conversation, debate, knowledge sharing? Not here. Culture: On the way in you’ll read a culture doc that appears to be written by someone who spent 15 minutes reading the back covers of business books at the Hudson News at O’hare Airport. Not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. And perhaps there was thought put into the document. But the principles in the document had zero correlation to what was happening in practice. I witnessed nothing that resembled collaboration, mutual respect, or any semblance of fun. Is it possible for an organization to just not have a culture? If so, this is the place. “Welcome to the ohana.” The GTM/marketing strategy felt very IT-firm-circa-2000. Not much going on (from my view). There was a weird dissonance. Selling the most cutting edge technological solutions via a strategy that seemed to be designed to sell fax machines during the Bush administration. Leadership was married to process in a manner that was absolutely debilitating. HEAVY on the process, light on the progress. Any impulse to think creatively and problem solve was extinguished after a week or two. The biggest export from the dept. seemed to be debilitating processes that served neither the company nor the staff. Worse yet, mostly a waste of time. Scaling a company is tough. I am not one to leave bad reviews. And I was only exposed to a small segment of life at Ashling. I would like to root for this company and I’m sure that there are folks doing great work here. But my experience felt like an SNL skit. I was just waiting for someone to break character.
