Bad culture and zero transparency - Software Engineer CTO.ai Employee Review

1.0
20 Mar 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Met a lot of great people working here

Cons

- Very high turnover rate - Engineers are told to build useless features that no one will ever use. - No market research or user surveys were done. Most of the product that was being built was all based on the CEO's intuition. - Company wasted a lot of resources hiring a bunch of sales and marketing people to sell something that is not functional. - Lack of transparency between upper management and the employees - CEO will make very questionable technical decisions. Most of the time he will disregard other senior engineer's opinions. Honestly, just stay away from this company. Upper management makes it sound like everything is okay and that the company is doing well, but in reality everyone knows that it's not and they choose not to communicate that. Lack of transparency, poor decision making/planning, and spending tons of money in unnecessary places has led to them laying off more than 50% of the company during the worst time possible.

Explore other reviews about CTO.ai

5.0
9 Oct 2024
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great direction and leadership team with conviction.

Cons

Many opinions on how technology should be built.

2.0
26 Mar 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- (was) good culture - (had) reasonable benfits and support - (had) helpful seniors - Good tech stack and learning opportunities - CEO is very committed to his vision, and believes each of his decisions is best for the company - CEO is an amazing salesamen, and I mean that truely

Cons

- CEO is very committed to his vision, and has made bad calls like all CEOs do. However, many of the CEO's worst calls were repeatedly called out by multiple senior and director but the CEO ignored all well reasoned advice. This is his perogative as CEO, and warning others is my perogative. - Because of this, they lost most of their profit streams, hired too many people, double downed on an ineffectual product at the expense of their profitable services side, and then fired half the company. - All of the best people have left of their own accord as they realized the way everything was going - A lot of the culture is now gone as even more of their good employees have been fired - Underpaid relative to market value, and extremely low promotion and raise rates - CEO being an amazing salesman means that he is very good at cleaning up the company's image after bad decisions. Also very good at dealing with external criticism. - CEO believes wholeheartedly all the advice from Silicon Valley founders, and embraces a machavellian attitude as the best way forward. Often, that comes at direct expense of employees.

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