FluentStream Technologies Reviews

With all the cons, you might ask why I even took the job? Well when I started the CTO was responsive and supportive but after he started his second job opening a restaurant/bar everything FluentStream became a second priority unless the CEO or Board was driving something. If you aren't part of the 'click' you won't be setup for success. The CTO is not a leader, he is a developer with the CTO title. He does not manage anyone. The CTO does not consider all solutions because he is an AWS Fanboy. He is very hypocritical with a 'do as I say, not as I do' mentality. They have a Chief of Staff better known as a glorified assistant to the CTO. That role was managing meetings and making excuses for the CTO's unavailability. It became too much for one person and a developer was promoted to help manage the work for the CTO and attend the meetings he could not make (nearly all of them). It became apparent that the promotion was based solely on the fact that the developer had flown out to help the CTO with his restaurant and quickly became the teachers pet. He does not have the knowledge to be in the role yet somehow can direct other developers on how to do the work they specialize in. If you question any of their direction or methodology you become the outsider to the Good 'ol Boy club. Leadership has allowed a toxic culture to be created, it started at the top down. The glorified assistant to the CTO is just as guilty. What is the point of a CTO that hires employees with the talent to do good work but only accepts the work done his way. His way is full of bottlenecks and rhetorical discussion.

It is the worst code base ever and it's a result of having a foundation of no one around to ever give quality code reviews but blame each other instead making for a horrible work environment to boot. Not only is it in a language I would heavily not recommend starting out your dev career in, but you won't be able to actually learn or grow into a quality dev because you're working on a codebase done by people who were paid so abysmally low and made to work so many hours that literally the only social life they could ever have is that within the "company". Even if you don't mind PHP, this is not the codebase to learn on unless you want to actually learn spaghetti code with no actual structure and then restart everything you thought you knew until after you leave and learn what it's like to work with quality engineers who don't just blame other coders behind your back but actually give quality code reviews for you to grow and learn from. The prior CEO loved to blame which is where the culture propagated from and hasn't changed since and it is extremely difficult to actually turn the codebase into quality code with the foundation it has while still needing to support a large customer base that genuinely seems to be a miracle that stays and grows.