Good pay and product overshadowed by toxic management - Account Executive Spellbook Employee Review

The work is creative, cutting edge, challenging high-velocity and new. The culture is mind over matter and anti-beurocratic. There are decades worth of experience mentoring you on difficult problems. Working at a startup isn't for everyone, but if you feel pressure is a privilege this is the place. Diamonds are made here!

Sometimes we feel "understaffed" but honestly, it's because the bar is high and I'm grateful for that.

You get a paycheque, but other than that, pretty much nothing.

This place has no real management, and nobody cares about or even sees your contributions. There are effectively no review cycles. There are two founding engineers with inflated egos who claim all the authority to tell people what to do and randomly take over or close other people’s PRs. They brought in some guy, presumably to fix some of the above, but his only apparent interest is replacing the workforce with his own people, which I’ve seen happen too many times throughout my career. This typically doesn’t end well. The tech stack is extremely trivial and boring. There aren’t any interesting projects; it’s all just shoveling data around and calling LLMs. Using an async task processor is about as complex as things get, and only a privileged few are even allowed to touch that without offending egos. Talking to product pretty much felt like interacting with a 14-year-old. In summary: one big kindergarten.