Even Financial Reviews

Even used to be a great company to work for. The CEO used to care for the people who worked at the company until he made a few leadership hires that were not great for the culture. These hires cared less about getting stuff done and only cared for the power they could grab within the company, despite not having real experience in their respective areas. Some members of the leadership team would focus more on finding time with the CEO to point blame on other teams as a way to undermine the other leaders, instead of finding ways to better collaborate across teams. This led to a shift in the CEO's care for certain teams and individuals because he would be getting information and making decisions in a vacuum with his friends. Many members of the leadership team tend to point blame at their direct reports instead of protecting them or coaching them, in order to avoid any real responsibility. It's hard to blame them though, because the CEO is quick to make rash decisions around the employment of people who aren't his friends. The previous reviews that say the company had let go of the leadership team members who were bad for the culture and that the company is thriving is completely false. There are two members remaining on the leadership team who are the worst to work with, who are still there, because they are best friends with the CEO. Due to this, the company is still hemorrhaging talent which is likely prompting their current hiring surge. The way the company handled their layoffs earlier this year was extremely unacceptable and didn't instill confidence for the "survivors" as they called them. The week prior to the layoffs, the CEO presented that we were in a good position, warned the company that there may be layoffs at some point but not in the immediate future. A week passed, and people were being called into meetings one-by-one, being let go, and lost access to everything immediately after - no one was allowed to say goodbye to their friends and colleagues. This ungraceful culling was off-putting to both the people who were let go, and to the "survivors". They also drastically cut salaries for everyone in this process, really hurting the ICs who were on the lower salary range. When given feedback on this in a company meeting, some leadership team members said that people should be happy that they even have jobs right now. I mentioned "unlimited" PTO in the pros section, however it's relatively challenging to take time off as the work-life balance really varies from team-to-team. You would often find yourself working late into the night as well as on weekends to meet the unreasonable demands from the CEO and his friends. Instead of having the ability to plan, prioritize and build something good enough to test, the CEO would add scope or new projects and still expect everything delivered in the same timeframe that he dictates. His comments when he got pushback often led to a response of "make the engineers work later and on weekends to get this done" and that he didn't care about anyone's burnout. This has led to many non-performant launches of business units due to a lack of proper discovery and GTM strategy; this in turn led to leadership pointing fingers at everyone but themselves. Despite the CPO and the People Team trying incredibly hard, leadership's lack of care or inability to address culture issues is truly heartbreaking. The fact that the CEO's friends can be called out by name in a review cycle by multiple people in the company and nothing happen to them with no changes made is ridiculous. Not to mention the regular promotions and salary increases given to these individuals, meanwhile ICs who are grossly underpaid can't get a raise approved despite increased responsibility.