First off, the owner is a completely out of touch loose cannon and paranoid bully that runs his company like it’s an army and he’s the drill sergeant. He even talks about how business is like war and being on the front lines. He thinks people are motivated by fear, anger and chaos. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve witnessed him go on 1, 2 and 3 hour rants involving him screaming, swearing and belittling people in front of other employees or even the entire office. He’s a borderline narcissist. You’ll often find him spewing political propaganda to his employees or making inappropriate jokes. He employs a tight unbreakable circle of leaders that are mostly his close friends and take their leadership cues from him. You can count on being yelled at and belittled by most of them. I’ve even experienced the CTO make jokes about “being hard as a diamond”, “popping the cherries” of new employees on a zoom call - he also loves to yell and scream at people too. And if you do bring up concerns about all of this, the company states this is who we are and how we function and it will never change. They pride themselves on this type of “unbuttoned” culture. You can kiss any flexibility out the window. Leadership has zero support for WFH regardless of the situation - even if you prove you can deliver high quality work on time from home - it doesn’t matter. They’ve even made us work in a dusty dirty construction zone for the last 10 months while they renovate the floors below us. Most weeks you can count on the internet going down, the heat or AC not working - but they insist on people being in the office. Again, it stems from paranoia and dated business beliefs. Bonuses are a joke. They will lie to you about bonuses just to string you along - but it’s all a stall tactic. They will force you into doing personal goals but not compensate you for that work via a bonus because it’s all tied to company performance. And unfortunately the company can’t figure out how to make any money these days - but they’ll drop a ton of cash to throw an insanely expensive holiday party. And good luck getting any financial information about the company - they keep most of that hidden. They even stopped doing quarterly business updates because leadership couldn’t agree on what information to share. It all seems very shady. This place also runs extremely lean on resources. They desperately want to be the next Samsung and have a massive product offering but refuse to staff up to support that. So you’ll often find yourself working nights and weekends just to keep up with the unrealistic workload. Employees just use this place as a steady pay check, albeit a low paycheck, but there is no loyalty to the brand from within, because people are mostly embarrassed by the company and don’t trust how it’s run. Usually people can stick it out for a few years until they realize their already low pay is never going to go up and there’s no path for growth. My suggestion would be to stay as far away from this place as possible.
