There's been a noticeable shift in management and culture over the last 6–8 months, so I'd take some of the older reviews with a grain of salt. The culture and work-life balance used to be genuinely good, but now I'd describe it as mixed.
Management can't seem to make up its mind. Priorities and goals change every quarter, and even the metrics used to measure success keep changing. Teams get renamed and reshuffled, but in reality it's often the same work with a different label.
The company has leaned heavily into AI, but it's more important to talk about how AI is improving productivity than to actually improve productivity. There's a lot of focus on the narrative rather than the outcome.
HR also seems determined to reinvent the review and calibration process every year. Everyone is expected to buy into the latest system, only for it to be revamped again the following year. It creates a lot of churn without much obvious benefit.
For a relatively small company, there is a surprising amount of bureaucracy. Every year seems to bring more processes, more reviews, and more frameworks. The company seems intent on adopting the bureaucracy of a much larger organisation while forgetting many of the things that worked well when it was smaller.