Diamond Foundry Reviews

Most people (referring to the technical teams here) who join this company are ones who are excited about the technology / product and just want to concentrate on doing great engineering work. Unfortunately, the current leadership creates such a strong sense of hierarchy and special-group exclusiveness, that makes it impossible for people to ignore all the corporate nonsense that have been generated. Current leadership has a tendency to run the company in a very top-down manner, thinking they alone can come up with all the strategies and solutions (Bad assumption. They are more ignorant than they even realize.). Unfortunately, the rest of the company outside of their small club of 'chosen ones' are treated like replaceable worker bees to be used, rather than real talent that can make a unique, meaningful impact. Given the small size of the company, this kind of hierarchy/exclusiveness culture becomes especially obvious to people. Needless to say, this has significantly diminished the sense of belonging for the majority of employees. If you are an engineer who is hoping to work on a project in a well-structured manner, accomplish something neatly and perhaps putting your achievement onto your resume, good luck with that. One day you are told something is important, then next month you get betrayed by top leadership as they decide not to give you the support you need, because some other issues have become ‘headline matter’ in their mind. Basically it’s like if you try to plant seeds to make a garden you will probably get trampled over by a tank from the top leadership before things come to fruition. Priorities frequently change in their minds and they generally suffer from a lack of discipline on sticking to any well-thought-out long term strategy (the right type of people who can help here are not in positions to act effectively). For many engineers, projects often have messy endings, and there is a lot of unnecessary waste for the company in general due to deficiency in proper planning and thoughtfulness by top leadership. The ones who are making key decisions in the company tend to be ones who are not really qualified (other than sitting on a high rank). Things can improve if they are more receptive to advice or delegate to the right employees. But all too often they are overly eager to become directly involved. Also some in the top leadership are relatively new (less than 3yr or so with the company). Understandably, some of these individuals have a strong urge to show that they can make a big impact. Unfortunately that’s usually not in the best interest of the company. The decision-making records of the top leadership demonstrates a lack of discipline, consistency and sometimes even common sense on how to run a company, manage people etc. Top leadership also spends a lot of time on virtual meetings, as opposed to trying to get close to ground truth. Often they come up with decisions / idea that look good on a slide deck, but because they fail to understand what it really takes to actually implement something (given all the priorities out there plus our resource limitations), eventually their plans don’t work out nearly as well as they initially projected. Executives often promotes an attitude of ‘don’t think, just do’, and try to make us all embrace it. But the result of frantically jumping onto a lot of actions without being thoughtful is that the teams run into nails all the time, which is totally avoidable and frustrating to see for someone with a clear mind. It might be better if top leadership takes this attitude to apply it somewhere else (how about go tell our customers ‘don’t think, just buy' ?) Perhaps the top leadership has been overly emboldened by past success of the company, thinking that now there is no need to worry about making rash, irreversible decisions. There have been instances where the top leadership tells all the technical teams to drop everything and only work on this super-high-priority ‘one thing’. Eventually, we didn’t make any break-through due to these crazy measures. They just led to more chaos and waste. Reminded me a bit of the Great Leap Forward movement in China in the 1960s, which ended disastrously. I often find it challenging to get top leadership to trust and listen. For years since I joined, top leadership has had a tendency to devalue people who are quiet rational thinkers, and favor people who talk a lot even when they don’t talk with much substance. If you are going to present something to top leadership, you either paint a rosy picture on things then walk away unscathed, or you try to stick to objective truths and probably get lamb-slaughtered afterwards. The company has now become rather ’top heavy’, having disproportionately many people in very senior positions. Some of them did not earn their way to these roles through a convincing path of progression that well-matched the cumulative values they have contributed in their fields during their time with the company (plus values brought in from prior experiences). These individuals include the head of the very department that is supposed to prevent error like this from occurring (a very nice person). Me and most of others are not enthusiasts of title-chasing. However, this company needs to respect the importance of having a fair, just system of giving proper recognition of the values delivered by employees across the board. Currently the company fails terribly at this. Promotions can be extremely handwavy, at the random whim of someone. Employees who have contributed more are often not rewarded/recognized in proportion. Constantly sweeping these issues under the rug shows a huge lack of ethics in how the company treats employees. Also I am not sure if top leadership understands that when there is a promotion of seniority , it doesn’t just mean ‘good job’. It is a public statement saying that the promoted person has grown to become capable of dealing with a wider scope of problems, displays greater maturity/experience, is ready to take on greater responsibilities, is a superior manager if this is a managerial role (imply suitable for coaching more junior managers on management, for example) and therefore becomes more valuable to the company. If the intention is purely to reward ‘good job achieving something’, then a big raise or bonus is appropriate. This company is not a garage start-up anymore. There is no acceptable justification for handwaviness in these matters. Ironically, despite all the cost cutting efforts, the top club of ‘chosen ones’ would get invited to go to these quarterly retreats in fancy hotels and restaurants, mostly to talk about stuff that could have been communicated in a normal work environment. These sessions tend to cover a very wide range of topics but stay rather shallow, and they have not shown ANY effectiveness in coming up with important decisions. How about spend the money differently to treat our hard-working employees a bit better? Overall, the company underpays compared to other employers who would want to recruit similar talent. Recently the company has also been cutting benefits here and there (e.g. abruptly cancelling employer-match of 401(k)), while having naive expectations that they can get away with all this without any consequence. The real core assets of this company are the talent pool it has gathered. So I find it mind-boggling how it treats its own people, especially given the amazing commercial success the company has achieved. The People Operations division should seek a different name if people at this company will continue to be treated like animals on a farm, where any kind of nonsense can be fed to them (e.g. 'stock options being our retirement plans’, or ‘oh it will take us a whole lot more time to create a 360 performance review process'). The performance review process here has so far been a joke. There is no pre-agreed benchmark that an employee knows, if achieved, he/she would get a certain raise or promotion. What determines those outcomes are very arbitrary and subjective. The company also adopts the policy of only giving raises (not catching up to inflation, btw) to exceptional employees whom they deem as having ‘moved the needle’. The problem with this approach is that the ‘needle' is almost always moved as a result of concerted hard work from plenty of people. Having a few takes all the credit is just not fair. When the top leadership want to push for an inconvenient goal, they can say anything absurd, as if assuming that nobody here is able to think independently. For example, during the COVID pandemic, they would preach messages like ‘ If you don’t get vaccinated, then that means you don’t believe in science and therefore you shouldn’t be working here.’ Or, ‘why don’t you all get vaccinated so that we can all take our masks off in this hot summer?’ (the proper solution was obviously to improve cooling in our building). Not that I am against vaccination. I did get it myself. But hearing this kind of logic from your own company leadership is just appalling. Then when the company cancelled employer-matching of 401(k), this was communicated in the name of 'freedom';. Of course, it had nothing to do with freedom. It’s a plain rob in compensation. Typically when employees have complaints, they would first reach out to their mid/high-level managers. None of these managers want to defend top leadership on this kind of nonsense (even though top leadership bundle them into that circle of ‘chosen ones’, creating the perception that they are all aligned). When the top management put people together to work on something, way too often there is a huge lack of thoughtfulness regarding how well people fit together in a group. Leadership has brought in a few individuals (without adequate consultation with the teams) who clearly don't belong to this workplace, such as someone who has a habit of being verbally abusive to coworkers at times. Another prime example is inserting a high-ranking person who consumes all the energy of teams because that individual often needs a whole lot more education to become up to speed in everything in order to arrive at sensible decisions, which could have been easily handled by others. Bringing this individual aboard as someone’s right-hand man is one of the most destructive executive decisions ever made (destructive both to the company and that individual). Sometimes top leadership also likes to hold some very large group brain-storming sessions. I guess they just don’t know enough of the subject matter and also aren’t sure whom they should trust. These sessions tend to be full of noises and do not generate deep-level discussions or useful conclusions. Furthermore, using these sessions to generate ‘action items’ is a terrible way to run the company. In addition, the current leadership has a bad habit of (again, without first seeking input from the teams) bringing in consultants / advisors who don't work well with the rest of the employees. Perhaps some of these consultants are just too eager to justify their existence. They often become big distractions, taking up a lot of unconstructive talking time, and suck out all the energy from people around them like a black hole. The teams should get the chance to vet these consultants before executives bring them in. Some of the things I write here sound like company culture issues. We do have a person who is supposed to be in charge of company culture, but that person stations remotely all the time and that makes it difficult for him to really understand the issues going on at our workplace. We do get occasional training sessions from this person, but they look like content taken out of general self-help books and I find them no better than listening to TED talks on organization/leadership. Perhaps there is a fool-ourselves illusion that having this person around means all of our culture-related issues can be dealt with. In reality, the issues we have here are too deep-rooted to be resolved by any one person. The CEO has irrational love for OKRs (objectives and key results). While the basic thesis may sound beautiful, its poor and rash implementation here has turned OKR into toxic waste that team leaders have to constantly deal with. Without thorough discussions regarding whether we should use OKR, and (if yes) which platform is most suitable for our company, the CEO went straight to forcing us to use a specific software that is actually poorly equiped to handle our needs. Setting up and maintaining this whole thing consumed a bunch of time and the employees at large do not feel any clearer what the company priorities are. I guess this is another example of ‘don’t think, just do’ attitude, which ended up sucking the soul out of everybody’s eye sockets for the impacted people. Someone may find it fun to scroll through the news feed as if it is workplace facebook. But to the majority, this is just a repulsive tool that facilitates unnecessary micromanagement. (Back when its implementation was rushed to my face, I knew I wouldn’t stay much longer with this company.) Depending on the job positions, some people have to work onsite all the time, some work remotely always. The majority of people I have seen work in a hybrid mode. This in itself is not a bad thing. But almost all meetings have gone virtual since the pandemic. Since it only involves click of a button to create a meeting, meetings have quickly become the main thing that dominate many people’s work, and that’s not good. Meeting is usually a time where work does NOT get done. But to the few high-ranking ones in the company, meetings seem to be a basic fabric of their work. They have a tendency to keep creating recurring meetings, often at frequencies higher than necessary. Some people who created meetings need to exercise better judgement on appropriate frequency, and whom to invite. Countless times I have seen two people going back and forth over a minor point for more than 15min in a big meeting, putting everybody else into hypnosis (obviously that conversation should be taken offline between those two). There are also a few IT-deficient leaders who often fail to understand the importance of muting themselves when they are just listening in a big virtual meeting, or would have difficulty using Google suite. (Come on, we are living in 2020s.) The South San Francisco headquarter is an open office that often runs out of private rooms, which can be annoying for people with meetings-rich work pattern. I want to emphasize that none of what I write here is personal attack on any character. When I am being critical about something, it is all professional and fact-based opinion. Despite all these shortcomings, job seekers may still want to give this place a shot, depending on what matters to them the most. What I illustrate here is information that I wish I would know if I am a job seeker. As a 9-yr longtimer and someone with exposure to both the very top and bottom levels of the company, I think I have a more in-depth understanding of these issues compared to, say, whoever is going to provide the ‘Diamond Foundry Response’ below. I would encourage job seekers to do careful research on your potential supervisor. There are micro-managers here, as well as bosses who feel increasingly insecure about themselves. If you do join, try to become self-sufficient and financially independent ASAP (or plan other exit route), so that one day when you find yourself in an undesirable situation, you have the option to simply walk away. In general, it is good to be able to free yourself from corporate slavery anyway. I think most employees here can figure out within 2-3yr whether this is a place they want to stay in the long term.