Lithos Energy Reviews

Oh boy, where to start? Three layers of management for the SW/EE group each live in different cities outside the US. They are not on the same page, give contradictory instructions to individual contributors, and are not in the office enough to know what resources exist and what does not. They work as individual contributors, doing technical work, instead of managing employees. Team meetings no longer exist (apparently they "took too much time"), there is no scrum-like process where people check in on what they are working on and if they are blocked (which we frequently are), and communication, even between people sitting next to each other, is rare, siloed, and mostly one-on-one, not in a group of relevant stakeholders. Consequently, there is absolute chaos, recently resulting in embarrassing failures out in the field with Lithos's main customer. This group's management is aggressive, bitter, hostile, and nasty, to the point that a manager in another group (rightly) pulled his people out of any interaction with this group in response to one of his people be cussed out in a meeting. I have great respect for this manager standing up for his people and doing the right thing. The EE and SW engineers in-house (and in-country) spend most of their time putting out fires created by the "management" who is doing most of the technical work. The in-house engineers are miserable, stressed out, and unable to get ahead of things. To this point, the failures verifying product coming out of manufacturing, that resulted in the aforementioned crises, stem from an absurd failure of collaboration between teams. Nobody can get ahead of things, nobody can do any planning, and any attempt to do so reveals inadequacies of management and is punished. Colleagues try to avoid having lunches with the CEO, claiming that "nothing good can come out of being noticed." Some employees have such distain for the company that they tell others to take home company property because "who cares?"