- They have no idea how to build a product, they simply push their solution to business areas where it doesn't make any sense, as if it was the next greatest thing.
- They will tell it is "because we are a startup" but the leadership doesn't know what they are doing. Projects will be greenlit just to be cancelled down the line a semester later then, a new project will appear out of "a brilliant idea" from some higher-up just to be cancelled when it is close to completion! And don't worry, as neither you nor your team has delivered "anything of value" to the company, no one will have any raise or promotion and your reviews will always remember that you didn't deliver and there'll be increased pressure.
- Constant incidents and on-call. Even though the company hired a bunch of engineers, which applied some bandaids, their opinions and suggestions for a improved and more reliable system were most of the time ignored, as "the real solution" was to bring a bunch of "leaders" from big companies.
- Micromanagement, both on top of workers and "floor-managers". There's almost a 2:1 proportion between workers and managers and the higher-ups want to know exactly what you are doing, almost by the minute, there is no trust. This increased over the years, up to a point where you have to report, daily, writing everything you did during the day (without any structure, as they have the hopes that they'll be able to plug some AI that will ingest all the data and tell what people are actually doing) in 3 different places, not only in the ticketing system.
- Layoffs (both explicit and implicit). (explicitly) They fired, in a single day, most of their engineering staff unrelated to individual performance. (Implicitly) They set some unachieavable targets only to have an excuse to cowardly fire some people. Meanhwile, not so good engineers are put into leadership positions due to nepotism and cause more delays and bad architecture.
- Too much faith among managers that AI will solve ALL problems, from the CEO down the company runs as a culture of forcing everybody to use it, if you show any disagreement they will gladly correct your opinion and "prove" how AI is always the right answer and you must use it in everything (up to the point of monitoring how much people are using it), regardless of any measurement of quality!
- Partnership with 'de-living' and 'always looking at you' companies.
- Individual contributors, regardless of how many years working at the company, are not valued. Incoming ex-FAANG management completely ignore any opinions and force their own processes "because it worked in a FAANG I worked before".
