CE-NO! - Senior User Experience Designer Telepathy Labs Employee Review

Cliffnotes: Don't do it. Save yourself the hassle. The downsides of Telepathy are a result of the CEO, Josselyn Boudett. Josselyn is a great sales person, but is no way qualified to run a software company. She cripples the company and it's employees by micro-managing rather than empowering people to do the job they were hired to do. This is especially true for people hired into leadership positions. There was a trend of putting her own biased demands in place, limiting the employees from exercising their true potential and then firing them for not doing more than she asked. Spoiler Alert: She fired me. I was one of the many people she pulled this stunt with. There were red flags a plenty shortly after starting at Telepathy. Here are a just a few: 🚩Ego Driven Josselyn thrives in chaos. She constantly created a chaotic atmosphere while everyone else was attempting to tame the fire and make things as simple as possible. She is a textbook narcissist. It doesn't take long to realize that the decisions she makes for the company are based on ego. After being at the company for a few weeks, I had evaluated the SDLC that was in place and identified multiple areas were things could improve to expedite progress. I approached Josselyn saying "I have some ideas as to how we might be able to improve the process between the teams. I'd like to set aside some time to talk to you about them." Her response was "Sure we can talk, but don't get your feelings hurt when we don't do anything about it." Needless to say we never had that talk. With an answer like that what would even be the point? Why was I even hired? 🚩Fear Based Management In order to align the teams (that are spread across the globe working in silos), goals and outcomes I thought a retrospective exercise would be useful. This exercise identifies what is going good, what is confusing, what is wrong and results in creating action items to encourage positive change. It promotes communication, collaboration and understanding throughout teams. I asked a few colleagues if they have ever ran through this exercise in the past. They said it was a great idea and was much needed. However, they said it would never work because people would not speak their mind in fear of getting fired. She is known to just fire people on a whim for speaking their mind. How does a company stand a chance of being successful if employees can't be forthright about the current state of things? How could anything ever improve if employees can't be heard or empowered to make a difference? 🚩Inadequate Communication The biggest struggle was the fact she was constantly contradicting herself making it very hard to follow her or know what is truth. It is not uncommon to have a discussion with her and the next day she gives you a totally different story. Two weeks after I started she left the office and said she would be back in FIVE months. She wanted to be involved in every final decision yet she could rarely be reached via slack or respond to email communications. If you did have a chance to speak with her she seemed to be incapable of listening. She was always distracted, taking other calls or responding to emails during meetings. Always trying to do three things at once. Always chaos. At the end of the day your input didn't matter anyways which is probably why she never listened to words others would speak. What will a company accomplish when it's lacking excellent communication? Especially with the CEO? 🚩Funds Money was an issue. The overseas teams went two months without being paid and still worked every day. How successful is a company going to be without money to fund it? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ My experience as a Sr UX Designer was like working in handcuffs when it came to Josselyn. The unfortunate thing for designers is that she has absolutely no idea what the role of a designer consists of or the value that design adds to a product. As a USER Experience designer, we need to be in close communication with the users of the product to ensure we are solving the correct problems for them. We need to talk to them to get our questions answered in order to start designing. She didn't feel that we needed to be involved in those meetings, we were to just take her word for what they wanted. Which was usually flawed. To no surprise she fired me without any prior indication of not meeting expectations. She called to fire me, I asked why and she said "I don't need to have a reason" (Florida is a right to work state). I said "Yeah I get that but you have a reason so what is it?" From there she was stammering around, giving reasons that contradicted the next reason. I said "I'm just shocked because I have had no problems with the teams, no complaints, all projects have been delivered on time, we are actually ahead" she said "Oh no. Nobody has a problem with you or with your work"....... Extremely unprofessional.