Where do I start?
The company pitches themselves as an “incubator.” I’m not sure, technically, what qualifies, but I’ll tell you what CT is up to. The CEO is personally financing the whole thing, and basically “throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.” Nothing coming out of the Austin office has actually shipped, yet, so “sticking” hasn’t happened. As a result, the CEO has become frustrated a few times that things aren’t “sticking” and has laid off whole teams at a time—teams of people who were working quite hard to execute the plans they were given, and can’t be blamed for the complete lack of vision/strategy/common sense those plans suffered from. The leadership that came up with those plans has largely survived these layoffs, with some exceptions. The most recent layoff affected dozens, some with C-level titles, in a company of only a couple hundred employees.
Vision is lacking, generally, and if you go all the way to the top and ask the CEO what a particular project’s vision/mission is, you’ll either get a funny look or the answer, “to make money?” If you ask a question like “what problem are we solving for the customer?” you’ll get more confused looks, and an answer to the tune of “but we think this technology is interesting, and that we can make money selling it, somehow.” Business plans/models are also lacking… or even absent across these projects.
This was the most dysfunctional place I’ve ever worked, with the worst workplace politics I’ve ever seen, the worst top-down communication I’ve ever seen, the most kingdom-building/turf-war behavior I’ve ever seen, and, as a result, the worst product development I have ever seen.
