Pros
There are some good people who work at BirchStreet as individual contributors. People are very friendly, often eat lunch together in the tiny little kitchen if there’s any space, and generally are pleasant to work with. Most of them want to leave.
Cons
The toxic culture is all fostered by the CEO himself with arcane HR policies, lack of strategy, and blatant disregard for taking care of employees. Employees are not valued at all. The company is focused solely on hitting sales numbers without any concern for long-term vision, operational capacity, or basic processes in product or software development. Great ideas for improvements are routinely shot down at the C-Level to the point where people don’t even bother. The CEO is catastrophically incompetent. The two base objectives of a CEO are to determine the company strategy and then to assemble the right team to execute upon that strategy. Steve Markle is incapable of both. His “Five Pillars” of his strategy are simply “sell more, sell more, sell more, etc.” His “sales strategy” is elementary at best without any operational or scalability strategies to go with it. Most importantly, he has no concept of team building or motivating modern knowledge workers towards a common goal. Quarter after quarter he stands in front of the employees telling them how great the company is doing while at the same time reducing pay and claiming the rampant turnover is “cyclical.” Prior to CEO, he was the COO and also completely failed in that role. The base objective of a COO is to increase profits by eliminating variability, defects and waste that undermine customer loyalty. Or simply put; to operate the company efficiently. Instead, the company operates in complete silos with zero visibility into actual capacity. Promises are made to customers without any regard to exactly how those promises will be fulfilled, and without any analysis or adjustments to operational processes in order to continuously maintain those promises. The results are customers frustrated with product defects and long deployment times, and employees frustrated because they don’t have the basic processes to be successful in their roles. The CEO and CFO go well out of their way to ensure employees are paid as little as possible while claiming “we’ve evaluated the market and this is fair.” They tell their employees “congratulations on your promotion” while giving them a 6% pay increase after 2 years, but then taking away their 10% bonus. What few bonuses existed are being phased out and raises are non-existent unless an employee fights for one; for years. They treat their employees like commodities when in fact people actually need to become specialists in BirchStreet’s poorly designed, patchwork software in order to do their jobs. Employees are forced accountability without any authority. Without the basics of operational process each employee has to be a “super hero” in their own way just to get the most basic tasks accomplished for the customers. Employee turnover is continuous. The CEO tells customers who complain “We can’t hire fast enough…” but the real answer is that they cannot keep the employees they have. Employees do not have the most basic tools to do their jobs. The company invests as little as possible back into their own IT, software, and office space. For a “technology” company many laptops are 6 years old (or older). The CFO will waste hours to squabble over a simple $50 software license fee to “ensure” it is actually needed, and force team leaders to write needless justifications so their team can complete basic tasks. It is a classic case of “penny wise and pound foolish.” The CFO should be ensuring best investment of company resources but instead he is a glorified accountant barely capable of basic math (see the salary comments above). Employees struggle to deploy or manage the product. The basics of Product Management do not exist. New features are added ad-hoc without documentation, support, or even basic testing. The common fundamentals of a Software Development Lifecycle are long lost on BirchStreet as their Dev teams just react to the latest demands by the company founder. The results are felt by customers who constantly have to deal with bugs, and by employees who are continuously frustrated by no operational process.