Orion Reviews

Too many decisions for the short term, at the expense of the long term The company often hired the first minimum viable candidate they interviewed. Instead of taking a methodical, deliberate approach to building a team, the company would hire the first “good enough” applicant. In a fast-paced, competitive startup culture, Orion needs the best workers it can get. Extending the hiring window by a few months to find a better candidate would more than pay off over the tenure of the employee. There were multiple years where we crammed work in at the end of the year so that we could bill a client before the end of the year. The goal was to make our yearly sales numbers look better to investors. This led to people quitting and lowered work output from those people who stayed. Inevitably the new year always started off sluggish, which then perpetuated the need to cram at the end of the next year with another arbitrary deadline. While raising our latest round of funding, the whole company was on financial lockdown. Money was delayed for replacing outdated equipment and software. Because of the office layout, it is impossible to have a remote meeting without noise interruptions. People regularly requested the company provide some solution to the problem but there was no money for making that situation any better. I made purchases on my personal credit cards to get the tools I needed to be effective at my job. The lost productivity from inadequate resources more than offset the increased funding we raised. Too much focus on investors and getting paid; not enough focus on users The upper management and C-level execs were entirely focused on appealing to the board, potential investors, and those people who *pay* for our products. They have very little interest in supporting those people who *use* the products. There wasn’t one glaring example of this priority alignment, but lots of small hints that made it clear where their attention lay. The quality of the product was dictated by a few very-overworked quality engineers, who were asked constantly to undercut their own standards so that code could be shipped early. There was zero culture of testing at Orion. It was “quality team's job to ensure quality”, not the software devs themselves. None of the engineering teams were externally motivated to write automated testing. The few automated tests that were created came from the impulse of a few individual developers. The only metric of success was the number of feature tickets closed. The company ethos is “we will succeed by having the most number of features” without regard to how well those features worked. The only validation we got on our product was from a few execs at a few large companies: those people responsible for writing the checks. There was no concern about individual people who would then use our product and whether they enjoyed and benefited from our products. At one point, Orion had an in-house UX engineer, whose main job was to conduct user testing and report back real problems to the team. After that person left the company, their position was not filled and all user-testing fell by the wayside. All customer-provided feedback stayed with the customer support team and was not shared with the engineering team. Deliberate employee churn The company structure is pretty flat: C-level <- VPs <- managers <- developers. The engineering and product teams are “siblings” on the organization chart, but the product team behaved as a "shadow level" of management over the engineering team. The product team had total control over what the engineering team built and how it allocated its time. The engineering managers were not given enough power to protect their employees and push back on the demands of the product team.The engineering team didn’t have the power to demand time for bug fixing or reducing technical debt. The engineering team didn’t have the power to say “No” to any poorly-defined requests from the product team. Scope creep was all too common; the bug backlog was always growing. Work would be half complete and then shelved, so that the engineers could move on to the next demand of the week. Despite being a company of only 45 people, Orion acted more like a company of 450. There was too much ceremonial process. Any decision requiring input from outside the engineering team was met with huge delays and red tape. The company practiced all the worst parts of Scrum and none of the Agile parts of Scrum. Orion runs essentially a waterfall process with Scrum meetings. Every new feature set needed a rigid estimate, even if the scope was poorly defined. If a bit of work was given a “loose” estimate by an engineer, the product team would always push back and try to get the engineer to nail down a more exact estimate. At various points the product team told the engineers how long they expected something to take. The company repeatedly signed contracts with customers locking us into yet-unbuilt features and deadlines, instead of working *with* them and refined an idea together. The team always had a plan and stuck to the plan, instead of responding to changes as they iteratively discovered what to build next. All this led to working in a joyless, relentless, heads down environment. In a single month in 2019, all the senior members of the web services team (three people) quit, leaving only three new hires. In an effort to calm the rest of the engineering team, the VP explained that the average Silicon Valley engineer stays at a position for an average of two years. The implication being that it was not a big deal that these people left, that it was the cost of doing business, and that the company culture was not to blame for them leaving. Desperate Optimism The CEO talks to employees like they are potential investors, not team members. He talks so much hype about opportunities for growth and market potential. He shares info about how the company is poised to sell more services, but doesn’t share anything about how he is creating a fulfilling and sane work environment. He spends so much time trying to get employees excited about the future and glosses over any past failures the company could learn from. Despite the overt attempts at building optimism, the company has many small screw ups that set back morale. Through a scheduling snafu at the start of the year, the company accidentally added two more holidays to the calendar than it should have. As the end of the year approached and they caught their mistake, the CEO announced that Christmas eve would no longer be a company holiday, but that they were going to “be nice” and let everyone “keep” New Years Eve. This was such a slap in the face to a group of people who had put up with so much stress this year. The CEO was clueless to the huge cost in company morale versus the small gain in productivity. In general, the company didn’t take any effort to entice people to stick around by creating workplaces that are a joy to be a part of. I initially thought that the company was just absent minded and oblivious about the burnout it was causing. However as more stressful deadlines came and went and we death marched year after year, it became clear that it was their *intention* to burn through people, to get two good years of work and then let them leave in frustration. Currently there are only seven employees (excluding founders) with three or more years with the company. Yet there are ten employees with less than a year tenure, 16 if you include the people who were laid off during the pandemic. Must of these new hires are backfills, not growth positions The final nail in the coffin for me was when this bad process was finally discussed openly, given a name, and lauded as something to be valued. At a recent all hands meeting, our CEO named this alternating cycle of high stress/high work low stress/low work as "fartlek", a term he took from endurance runnung training. His belief was that this was going to "increase our stamina" instead of leading to burnout. It was clear to me how little he knows about organizations, and how to grow relationships between individual people. Everything is an “incident” The company was founded by two volunteer firefighters. They brought Incident Management Response to the company culture. It is a great tool if the work requires responding to emergencies (e.g. fighting fires). But it is a terrible tool for something as steady-state as software development. The mantra was “If we don’t already have a process for this, then it’s an incident.” The problem is that as a small growing business there are *lots* of things Orion doesn’t yet have a process for that are not emergencies. The goal of Incident Management is to avoid panic in uncertain situations, but it still raises the stress level of everyone. “Oh crap another incident. The Andon light is red. Drop everything to make sure I don’t need to help out”. We had multiple “incidents” that were simply the company trying to ship new features to a big customer. There were other times where an incident lasted over a month. These were demoralizing stressful events. Remote work was an afterthought The company was very skeptical of remote work. It only hired remote employees as a last resort, when it couldn’t find any candidates in the Bay area. Remote employees were forced to be on west-coast time. None of the in-office employees had any experience being remote themselves, so they had no skills in helping the remote workers be more effective. Video conferences were usually terrible for remote workers. A remote member would always have to interrupt the meeting and have everyone repeat themselves because the A/V quality dropped out for a minute, or the camera was never pointed in the right place, or the mic was never turned on, or there was background noise from the other conference room. Sometimes in-office people would casually start the meeting outside the conference room before the meeting “officially” began, leaving remote people one step behind. After a handful of employees demonstrated the effectiveness of remote work, the company was still not willing to change and adopt a remote mindset. In-office people were always complaining about being stuck in traffic or getting delayed on BART, without any realization that they too could be just as effective by working from home. As a small software company, Orion should have been absolutely prepared for the stay-at-home measures during pandemic. But instead, the company was flung into total disarray. None of the in-office employees had any clue what to do or how to be effective as remote workers, since they were not given the opportunity to develop those skills before the pandemic. Ultimately, great ideas don’t equal great execution. It is the people and not the ideas that lead to success. After the recent layoffs, as everyone else was nervous about their own job security, the CEO tried to reassure everyone that Orion is in a position to grow after this pandemic. Building real-time voice communications and tools for front line workers is exactly what Orion is good at, and these services will be in even higher demand going forward. So presumably the company is poised to benefit once the economy starts to open back up. But opportunities don’t magically materialize into reality. The company may be closing deals, but it is not building a sustainable team and creating a work environment so that it can actually achieve that reality.

Company had major layoffs and turnover that affected product roadmap. New CEO restructured after I left, removing some of the most creative on the engineering team. People are fired seemingly overnight. There is a sense from existing employees that new management is arrogant, untruthful, and poorly managing the company. Company size is shrinking drastically and Sales doesn't seem to be performing at all and seems to have no traction in the market.