The fundamental flaw with this company are the founders and at the risk of being cliche, the fish rots from the head.
The first indication of trouble was early in my tenure at SB when a coworker was trying to run a meeting, sometime around 4pm and one of the founders was in the kitchen area drunkenly yelling and pounding his fists on the counter throughout the meeting. It was around this time, that some deeper and more disturbing complaints about the founder came to light. At that point they were little more than rumors, and I shrugged them off believing that they either weren't as serious as they sounded or that it was ok because we were bringing in people who were going to "make things better." I regret not calling it quits when I found out about this impropriety.
Then began a long series of restructures, tile changes, and changes of management, and an equally long series of well-intentioned people who believed that they could make a special place better and figure out a way to handle the founders who were damaging the company, but seemed to stay mostly out of the way when things were going well financially.
Let me give some context. It was very hard to know how the company was doing financially. There were meetings about it, but they were hand-wavey, vague, and never showed anything negative at all. In fact when financials were reported to the leadership, the founders would often argue with the CFO (who was amazing, btw) about numbers they didn't like and why it wasn't as bad as it looked. Directors weren't given operating budgets, financial forecasts, detailed pipeline information, or any guidance other than to hire people or not.
Then things stated to go more poorly financially and all hell broke loose. At a time when we were having trouble booking projects to capacity, the owner also decided to open an office in New Orleans. Market research was done as well as it could be, and showed that while on the upswing, the tech market in NOLA was in it's infancy. The plan was that the Durham office would funnel extra work while SB NOLA got leads and established itself. The problem was is that there was no work to funnel by the time the office opened.
This is when the layoffs started, mind you they were never called layoffs. People were let go a few at a time. The first few rounds were mostly people who were underperforming in some regard, or were not billable but drawing big salaries. The line was always "they were a bad fit."
This was disturbing, but made sense for a lot of the early layoffs. Then the layoffs started not making sense for the "not a good fit" excuse when they started targeting people who were generally loved and it was agreed did good work. One time, when the owner went out on vacation, a note was sent outlining the real reason that people were being let go, that we didn't have billable work for them. When the owner came back he was irate that anyone might have gotten the idea that the company was in financial trouble.
There were a couple of factors that led to me leaving. First, and foremost is that I was being forced by management to put someone on a performance improvement plan, who didn't deserve it. Second is that I saw some of the inappropriate behavior first hand and even had a female coworker ask me to not leave her alone with the owner.
