Pros
- Opportunities to give and receive mentorship - The camaraderie that stems from mutual suffering
Cons
Executives/Management - Executive team lacks prior experience running software companies, and it shows - Leadership rejects most industry standards/best-practices in favor of home-grown ideas such as teams-of-one and mandatory journal-keeping - Company mission and strategy are neither written down nor clearly communicated - Projects are driven by ad-hoc demands and flighty goal posts - Teams that lack project/product managers must deduce their tasks and deliverables with infrequent check-ins - Teams that are overseen by CEO or VP are micro-managed based on fickle intuition rather than systematic problem solving - Managers and executives take credit for work by their teams Culture - Banking culture flows from the top-down - Poor work/life balance; 9-6 workday. 9am is enforced by executives. Employees have been forced to work weekends and late evenings - Thematic feedback provided by workers to managers greeted with hostility - Meetings disguised as cultural engagement are used to out-maneuver critique, not to mature the organization - Employees threatened with retaliation against speaking out against executive indiscretion - CEO's bi-weekly all-hands meetings involve belittling employees Attrition - Unusually high and consistent rate of attrition. In last 5 months, approx. 60% of NY engineering team resigned - There are currently more managers and executives in the NY office than software engineers - Attrition seen by management as not structural, but a series of bad hires - One employee favored by the CEO neglected work for over 6 months, and was rewarded with applause and a party upon exit - Other resignations met with the demand to leave immediately after giving notice