There has never been a better time to be in AI, and there has never been a worse time to be at Forethought. The company culture used to be great, and understandably there were some shifts when there was a RIF in Fall. However, we have yet to bounce back and I doubt we ever will. It’s really disappointing because there was a lot of potential. Nearly every perk for working at the company is gone (free lunch in the office, a home office set up fee, social events, in person offsites) unless you consider equity a perk. The leadership team does a lot of finger pointing to avoid responsibility. There is a perfect combination of extreme toxic positivity and a severe lack of psychological safety. While employees are told that they can speak directly to the leadership team, most previously shared feedback has fallen on deaf ears or met with defensiveness so people don’t want to share (and genuinely fear retaliation). There is no strategy for customer retention or company growth. We get a lot of customer and prospect feedback on the product being buggy or missing critical features, but these issues continue to happen without any resolution. There is so much unwarranted self confidence that churns and losses are not taken into consideration for product changes or updates. There are many middle managers who lack core competencies and emotional intelligence. Teams are so overworked and resentful, and their managers are completely unaware. If they are aware, they do not know how to motivate people or check in with them. Instead, they take a more aggressive stance. The company needs to prioritize teaching people leaders how to be a good leader. There is also absolutely no company communication plan. When people are fired (becoming more and more frequent) or people quit (also becoming more and more frequent), the rumor mill works very fast. Because there is no company wide communication plan (or when there is, it’s too delayed and too little too late), people are surprised to find out that someone has been gone from the company for a while. This happens repeatedly, and there is never a solution. Everyone is burned out. Many people get “promoted” with a new title but no increase in salary - this trend has picked up a lot in the last year, and is now part of the employee handbook as standard practice. When the leadership team is asked how employees will be rewarded for all of the additional work they’ve taken on, the response is either “the macroeconomic climate” or “Facebook/Google/Amazon also aren’t giving people raises.” There is no interest in making the employees here feel valued or trying to retain them. There are clearly favorites who get what they want, and other people are tossed to the side or seen as difficult if leaders don’t like them for some reason (usually for respectfully disagreeing). I don’t think that there’s a single situation in which I would recommend joining the company. We’ll be lucky if we still have the lights on in one year.
