Good engineering team, bad leadership - Software Engineer SESO Employee Review

Engaged and aligned team: Everyone is rowing in the same direction, and the level of commitment across the company is inspiring. Fantastic customers: The agriculture clients we serve are warm, authentic, and straightforward, which makes the work rewarding on a human level. Meaningful mission: The problems we’re solving are complex and impactful. Supporting the agriculture industry feels like important, purpose-driven work that makes a real difference. Aligned leadership: The leadership team is aligned, communicates clearly, and works well together. Remote-first culture: Provides flexibility and balance while keeping the team connected.

Lean operations: We’re still running lean, which means being thoughtful and disciplined with resources and spending. Regulatory dependency: Shifts in government regulations can impact priorities quickly, requiring fast pivots and adaptability.

General flexibility of fully remote company. Decent benefits in terms of Health Care (fully cover employee, 90% of dependents), life ins, disability ins, etc. Unlimited PTO but we'll get to the trade off on that in a bit. Stock options too if that's your thing. The non-leadership people are some of the best, hardest working, most genuine people you'll meet. There are advancement opportunities if you work hard enough for it, but the expectations are incredibly high, if not outright unrealistic.

A company rises or falls on its leadership, and right now it's falling. Leadership is absolutely directionless. Trying to accomplish too many things at once causes you to lose focus on what was successful in the first place. Leadership also does not value its employees - when I started there was a definite startup vibe, and the leaders at least seemed to care about the employees. Now it's all so corporatized and in pursuit of "up and to the right" at all cost (including human cost). Many leaders are two faced as well - smile on their face but a dagger up their sleeve. Unlimited PTO sounds nice but I'd be willing to bet most people at Seso take less than 2 weeks off off per year. In addition with unlimited PTO, if you resign or are let go, you don't get any accrued time paid out. There's also been a lot of firings and resignations lately, so a lot of turnover and a lot of general angst amongst the employees about their place in the company. If you want to always be unsure of where you stand with your employer, and always be walking on a tightrope of "do I have a job beyond this quarter or not", then this is the place for you.