Pros
Plenty of talented people who want to do big/great things. The idea behind the product is great and CPGs can gain a lot with something like this. Despite all the cons listed, I learned what a company and leadership shouldn't be, and I'll apply that incredibly valuable insight to my roles moving forward.
Cons
- They make several promises they do not intend to keep and engage in highly manipulative behavior with employees to avoid accountability for said unfulfilled promises. They won’t commit to anything in writing or set timelines.
- The various departments live in their own worlds and no one is aware of what's wrong with the product, processes, or unhappy employees as no one talks to each other to improve things - or they don't want to believe that things are bad.
- Although they claim to be an ad tech SaaS company, they use too many hammers and chisels to build and fix things instead of programming. They haven’t improved on the product/UX in years because they didn’t know that anything was wrong with it.
- Their values were written by a third-party contractor and they don't do a good job of upholding any of them even though they use them to hire new prospects. One of their values is "constructive dissent” and on multiple occasions mention that feedback is welcome, but unless it's positive, they won't listen to you. As they only seem to want "YES" men/people at their side, feedback at times is even a punishable offense and they slowly begin to show that they do not care about the wellbeing of their employees.
- Additionally, preference is given to those who silently obey upper management while the ones who speak up are shunned. They want loyalty over doing the right thing, and those who are not loyal to upper management are stepped on, ignored, and/or kicked out.
- Although people speak up about incompetent people and them being blockers to doing a good job, upper management prefers to keep those people around rather than letting them go to save face, as management doesn’t want to be proven wrong.
- People who don't do any work and claim credit for other people's work get paid a lot, while the people who do a lot of work get paid very less.
- There is no proper HR team.
- They bait you on a 4-day work week but it doesn't apply to 100% of the company even though they sell it to 100% of the prospects they want to hire.
- There is no functional process in place for non-leadership to influence meaningful change.