A Bad Soap Opera - Anonymous employee Prometheum Employee Review

The premise behind founding Prometheum was brilliant, but the digital asset space is now very crowded. Every financial services company wants digital securities as a new asset and the race is on to deliver. Where is Prometheum in this race? Well behind the start line. Chaos is expected at a start-up company, but Prometheum is beyond the start-up definition. The less favorable reviews, and red flags in those reviews, still resonate today. Dirty office politics, lack of transparency, finger-pointing, and disrespectful behavior are chronically normal at this company and the outcome is chaotic dysfunction. The chaotic dysfunction results from a select group of individuals that want only to protect themselves and their positions within Prometheum. There are a few employees who have no contact with this select group, but the majority of employees must tread lightly on eggshells around them. Their tactics and behaviors are well known. Well-meaning colleagues offer warnings to avoid the resulting wrathful behavior, but those warnings only strengthen, affirm, and normalize the toxic behaviors of those individuals. Meaningful collaboration, truth, and transparency are not a part of Prometheum’s culture. They are not agile and any process improvements or suggestions to adhere to the most basic agile methods are not welcome. Any individual who has a smidgeon of agile experience will very quickly ascertain that processes appear agile but they are actually waterfall. Teams are not involved with planning and there is a heavy dependency on leads reviewing, assessing work without collaborative input. Questions are pushed out and there is a lot of unnecessary back and forth. Gaslighting and lack of transparency are unpleasant complications in day-to-day work. Backstabbing and spewing vitriolic untruths behind backs is so common that it is difficult to discern what is really happening. Commonly heard finger-pointing phrases were “they don’t know what they’re doing” and “that person really messed it up”. Projection 101. The nasty office politics is like a bad soap opera which is watched and endured on a daily basis. Asking too many questions, failing to tow an imaginary company line, not doing things the exact, undefined way they want them done, not keeping mouths shut and not doing exactly as told, will get an individual fired. Concrete proof is not required to dismiss an individual either; dismissals have been based solely on hearsay from the exact individuals who only want to protect themselves. Prometheum was founded by attorneys that cling to the right to work law and use it to their utmost advantage. The disrespectful behavior witnessed was applied to internal colleagues and external companies. In all instances, the aberrant behavior was unnecessarily combative and abusive. There is absolutely nothing that warrants combative and abusive behavior toward anyone, and it was appalling to witness. If you guessed the disrespectful behavior was from the select group of individuals that only want to protect themselves, then you would be correct. If you want to work for a company that respects and values transparency, collaboration, respect, and agility, then do not work at Prometheum. The ugly, dysfunctional culture is beyond fixable; it must be purged…and that will never happen.