This job was the most overwhelming, lifespan-reducing job I've ever had.
The management team is almost never on the same page, and there is constant sniping and bickering between teams -- every manager is fighting to be on top in terms of power, and every conversation feels like a fight waiting to bubble up. You can honestly just feel the tension between people, even if they are peers.
Managers are experts in their field and are personally very intelligent and driven, but are largely unexperienced at actually being managers, and as such they show little drive or direction in mentoring and bringing up the rest of the team with them. Often, it seems that the goal is to actively work against their own team members, and this is speaking to multiple departments. The culture differs vastly between teams, the more cohesive teams (unsurprisingly) are the ones with the most hands-off managers who (by sheer lack of involvement) are indirectly trusting their team.
There is very little emotional intelligence among the executive team. There is a total lack of positive feedback to employees, and a large emphasis on negative feedback (again, across several if not all departments). Some members of management do not realize that unsolicited shoulder rubs are inappropriate and may make women uncomfortable in the workplace. Complete lack of social awareness.
They want to have the image of a startup, but the culture is more similar to a finance firm/typical corporate culture. HQ is an open office, but if you think you can just openly communicate with the CEO, you're wrong -- they should just have offices to emphasize that there is a hierarchy in communication that certain levels will be scolded for skipping over. It's like they didn't realize that the open office conveys an openness of communication that does not actually exist and is actively discouraged in the culture.
There is no structure in place to help employees grow or learn, and as with many startups, it is very easy to be taken advantage of and not be valued at your true potential. There are several lower-level employees with advanced degrees and years of experience who are basically doing monkey work and don't have anywhere to grow. They have someone with literally decades of experience in the same sales role that is now being advertised as only needing 5 years experience, for example.
Managers additionally have no personal accountability and often treat staff-level workers (female) as their personal secretaries -- i.e. grown men regularly cannot figure out how to print on the singular printer in the office and have women print for them instead of taking two minutes to figure it out. When something goes wrong, it is not a lesson to learn from, but an opportunity to berate and demean the employees in your team. Don't expect management to apologize and actually mean it, i.e. not repeat the same toxic, unsupportive behavior in a day or two.
The new office is nice, but it's a huge open office and as such it's very loud. Most people have to use headphones to be able to focus, or they just go work in the cafe across the street to avoid the noise of sales calls and the ping pong table.
Work/life balance is a joke. I was regularly emailed at 2 or 3 in the morning, over holidays, and during vacation. You have to be "on" all of the time. Absolutely zero understanding that people work to make money, and then take that money back home to their actual lives to enjoy.
The best part of this job were the office dogs. They were the only group that consistently treated employees like human beings. :)
In summary, this is an incredibly low-trust, low-EQ environment with little room for your own professional growth. They use "this is an amazing opportunity" as an excuse to treat you poorly, as though you'll never find another great opportunity out there in the world.
If the level of micromanagement on this GlassDoor page (Responses to every post? Seriously?) alone doesn't give you insight to this company's culture, I don't know what will.
