Data: The company is all about data. So much so, that when employees want something, leadership snaps back with "what is the data showing?". This is evident in our Customer Experience team where employees would say there's a growing problem with the flagship product, for example, and leadership immediately asks where the data is. If Engineering brings up the same issue, we take immediate action.
Family?: Leadership tends to regard the company as a "family" due to our family-oriented product and desire to be a cool, close-knit startup. This leads to impossible expectations for a business. Sure, we can hang out after hours, but you'll still layoff a chunk of the team to extend runway. During COVID quarantine, team moral is low, especially while some of us are on reduced salaries (second time this has happened, I believe). Obviously it's to extend runway, but leadership would rather keep a year's worth of runway than improve employee happiness.
Software Team: Leadership pushes the small engineering team. Their team seemingly has one person doing all of the electrical-design work, one person for iOS, one for Android, operations/marketing. cloud, etc. They're all worked to the bone and are expected to take on additional tasks to help out marketing and Customer Experience. No initiative to hire dedicated technical support.
Leadership doesn't do anything to diversify the company. During an all-hands meeting, John seemed to put our diversification initiative on one of our two minority employees. There's a subtle difference in how minorities are treated in the workplace, based on the leadership's lack of recognition or compensation for minority contractors. We'd typically give a salaried offer to any contractor who has been with us for 90 days, but after talking with our 2 minority employees, I found that one was offered a position after a year of contracting, and another is still on an hourly wage without benefits for a year now. The team (especially leadership) also doesn't take the initiative in starting conversations with new minority contractors, unless they need something. One contractor joined part-time to do software work, and I didn't see leadership care to initiate a personal conversation with him. Maybe things about his work, but even that was spoken through this contractor's manager's mouth, a white male. It seems like leadership (John) keeps saying he cares about ethnic diversity just to play innocent to the social condition of minorities.
Based on these cons, I'm giving a poor rating. Until these items are improved, I'm leaving my review up.