If you value yourself at all, stay away.
Pros
Some of the other employees who work there are very good people
Cons
- Circle creates an environment where working overtime is glorified. This behaviour is modelled by most individuals in management and upper management. - Sometimes they will ask you to do “voluntary overtime” - a ridiculous concept, since not accepting will lower your chances of promotion or raise - and they will only compensate you with equal time in lieu, and maybe a few lunches or small gift cards. This especially punishes people with families who value spending time with them. Circle burned out and drove away their most loyal and hardworking employees by: - Setting unreasonable, arbitrary, deadlines which caused them to do lots of unpaid overtime - Hiring incompetent (cheap) contractors, which forces existing employees to handhold them through everything - Actually guilting employees for making any mistakes - reminiscent of parents scolding children - Management leans on guilt tactics to “light a fire” under employees in an effort to squeeze every ounce of unpaid overtime they could out of them, rather than addressing their own poor planning practices. - QA and Engineering team members are often blamed if bugs slip through development and testing. But the majority of the testing is manual, time consuming, and prone to human error. It’s been years and they still haven’t figured out how to automate tests properly. - CTO constantly brings up what he learned in his MBA in order to justify poor decisions. - I know multiple employees who have needed therapy, just to deal with the abuse dealt by management, upper management and the c-suite at circle. The tactics they use are in line with an abusive relationship, including: - Gaslighting their employees when they go to management with concerns - Minimising concerns of their employees - Talking down to and in some cases, yelling, at their employees - Isolating employees from their families (through overtime expectations) - Circle sometimes sends out surveys to employees about working conditions but then doesn’t address the major issues (again - ignoring employee concerns) - They laid off ~10% of their staff when they were acquired by the Vulture Capitalist company, Thoma Bravo. This makes it difficult to hire new talent. - Circle lays off staff regularly for “poor performance” - but managers never gave these staff Performance Improvement Plans or any warning/communication that there was anything wrong with their performance. - Circle has archaic views on progressive work practices like remote work. They think bringing people back into the office full-time will mend their broken culture. - There are few opportunities for career growth. Come here if you want to work in an outdated, mostly legacy, codebase where bandaid solutions are encouraged. Oh, and current employees, just wait. When you read this review and bring your concerns to management - the amount of rationalizing you'll get in response will be unreal. But I'm sure you're used to the rationalizing at this point. After all - all of this is your normal now.
