Significant Cultural Shift Post-Acquisition - Data Science Team Lead Cyara Employee Review

I joined Cyara through the Spearline acquisition in March 2023 and immediately noticed a distinct cultural shift. Spearline was a great place to work, but the acquisition has brought several challenges. 1. Toxic Work Environment: There is a noticeable prevalence of office politics, especially between teams and individuals from different acquisitions, resulting in a lack of trust. Also regular redundancies adds to job insecurity and negatively impacts morale. 2. Leadership Issues: The leadership team includes individuals who often seem incompetent, unsupportive, and prone to micromanagement. Some members of the leadership and management team consistently spoke to employees in a disrespectful and condescending manner. This behaviour created an uncomfortable and demoralising work environment. Professionalism and respect are critical in any workplace, and it is disheartening to witness and experience a lack of these values from those in leadership positions. 3. Lack of Recognition: Employees frequently experience a lack of recognition and respect from a constantly changing leadership team. 4. Hiring Freeze and Burnout: The company is heavily focused on hiring sales personnel to drive revenue while keeping engineering costs low through a hiring freeze in the engineering department. This has led to burnout and high turnover, indicating a lack of concern for employee well-being. All products will suffer due to this and will cause a ripple effect through the companies overall performance. 5. Product Vision and Strategy: The product team lacks a clear vision or strategy. Despite marketing claims about being AI leaders, the company lacks the necessary infrastructure and expertise to back these claims. Many so-called “AI experts” in the company lacked the qualifications, hands-on development experience and demonstrated a significant gap in technical knowledge. This disconnect was evident in the internal presentations and online articles/blogs delivered by these individuals during my tenure here. Overall, the experience at Cyara post-acquisition has been very disappointing due to these issues