Envato Reviews

Misalignment between leadership and everyone else Confusing priorities

- Leadership is overwhelmingly performative and highly incompetent. Success is measured by optics, messaging, and internal theatre rather than output. If you value autonomy, ownership, or simply being trusted to do your job, this is not the place. - Management layers are heavily focused on narrative management and protecting their patch. Looking productive, faking enthusiasm and dropping emojis in public Slack channels are all far more important than actually delivering anything. If you try to operate outside of what your manager deems within their control or worse - their own knowledge/ability - you will be swiftly whipped back into line and framed as problematic. - The company direction is constantly shifting to the point that it is truly lost. Strategy is very reactive and short-term, usually chasing the latest tech narrative. Currently everything is being framed as “GenAI will save us”. - Interviews here are a lesson in deception. The work, your role and the company culture described during hiring (collaborative, empowering, transparent, psychologically safe) does not resemble the reality employees experience. - Most roles here lack a clearly defined mandate, yet are subject to unusually high levels of oversight (I.e., micromanagement). Expectations shift frequently without communication creating a highly stressful and directionless operating environment. - Psychological safety is extremely low. Questioning decisions or pushing back on weak strategy is risky because the leadership culture is insecure and highly defensive. They will shoot you to save themselves. - Chaos is the day-to-day and is routinely reframed as something positive - “keeps you on your toes” or “that’s where the good stuff lives”, when in reality it’s just poor leadership. - Employees spend an enormous amount of time validating their own roles and existence within the org chart, trying to “impress” or keep up appearances, rather than just achieving a quality output. Everyone is quietly scrambling to justify why their position should survive the next restructure. - Layoffs and internal reshuffles have created an atmosphere of uncertainty where long-term thinking is impossible. - The overall trajectory feels short-term and positioning-driven rather than sustainable. Many decisions make more sense if you assume the end goal is acquisition rather than building a stable business. The reality is, taking a job here is placing a large bet on a sinking ship.