Volta Labs Reviews

Goals are set by upper management without sufficient input from the people who will actually see them through. Consequently, timelines are exceptionally impractical. Leadership, panicked by the prospect of not meeting their unrealistic goals, imposes aggressive work expectations on the rest of the employees. People are pressured to work dramatic hours and weekends in a futile attempt to keep things on schedule. This strategy yields the opposite of its intended effect, instead both decreasing morale and fostering distrust in leadership. When a deadline is inevitably missed, upper management blames frontline managers and employees for their own failures. Favoritism is a major issue. Unqualified people are elevated to leadership positions on the basis of saying yes and not pushing back. Experienced leaders brought on to add some much needed structure do not last long. Consequently, no one is able to break through the bubble inhabited by the CEO and his best friend, who tightly control the company. Feedback to upper management is taken personally and puts a target on your back, making it difficult to enact positive change. Unprofessional leadership will choose several people to scapegoat, blaming them for the delays and unhappiness of the company at large. They create an uncomfortable environment by frequently gossiping about others, describing their character and work in a negative light. Despite the fact that the company’s issues persist when these employees resign or get fired, those in charge refuse to look inward and admit that they are the root cause of the problem. Instead, they repeat the cycle and find a new batch of employees to blame. Termination of effective employees under questionable circumstances and resignations are so commonplace that the delays never end.

The direction of this company has really gone downhill since I joined. The CEO communicates so ineffectively with teams, only gives harsh criticism constantly and way outside of work hours. Paired with the fact he can’t make any decisions without his best friend in the company and he lies (a lot) which has made many not be able to trust him. There are absolutely no women represented in leadership, and culture and morale is consistently low. The CEO has created a toxic workplace filled with favoritism, disrespect, micromanagement and does not empower employees to do their job. On top of that, engineering timelines are so unrealistic and do not account for our current team size. We also do not pay competitively at all and veil it with “equity”, but then also don’t give out much equity to early employees. CEO also consistently brings the same person (that’s not our Co-founder) into every meeting with him because this person always agrees with him. It’s become a damaging relationship to the company as others feel they can’t voice their opinions if it differs from the two of them. We also recently had an employee resign on their own, my guess due to a lot of what is mentioned above, and the CEO held a company-wide meeting to discuss them in a negative light and spread misinformation about them as a professional and it made people feel uncomfortable about what he might do if any of us ever quit. There are limited career growth opportunities and no leveling criteria to support promotions. Lastly, hiring expectations are unreasonably high, and our CEO is the hiring manager for every single role including junior level positions. This is making organic growth unnecessarily hard for our Engineering team and we will likely struggle to hit our timelines because of it.