Where to start?!
1. The company perpetually operates in house-on-fire mode. Many products are poorly maintained (good luck if you work in a non-US market like France or Japan and you have to defend IAS products to clients complaining about the latest malfunction). But we are told there are never resources available to fix them, because of other "priorities" (what priorities?!). An absurd amount of time is spent in preparing roadmaps that get promptly scrapped or hijacked by whatever goes through the mind of the executives.
2. Terrible retention / understaffing problems across the entire org. C-level solution to that? Hire more freshers in India! No self reflection on why entire departments / teams are leaving in a short span of time.
3. There is no strategy. "Make more money" is not a strategy. Successful companies build a strategy that allows the business to grow (and make more money), instead of just rushing in panic to the shiny objects here and there, without ever reaching any. A lot of acquisitions in 2020-2021, and none of them has been integrated in the business, leaving clients baffled. Competitors are constantly stealing accounts, and leadership has no way to address that.
4. Employees are treated as children, or totally dispensable resources that can be pushed from one task to the other. Many of these are high performers that built the success of the company through the years. No surprise everybody is leaving.
5. IAS is the poster child of corporate nepotism. Most of the inner circle comes from Yahoo!. Yes, you read it correctly, Yahoo! (exclamation mark!). It seems there is a market for people that join failing companies, make them fail even more, and nevertheless manage to enrich themselves before moving on to the next company and repeating the cycle.
6. The existence of an inner circle is clearly a problem that deserves its own bullet point. Here we go! Toxic culture overall. The inner circle constantly operates in self-preservation mode, and sets up other people to take the blame for the failures they create. Good luck speaking up with your informed view on anything. If it's not aligned with the inner circle, you are branded. Obviously, they surround themselves with enough lackeys that tell them they are always right.
7. Equity grants are laughable compared to other tech companies.
8. Try to have a conversation on ad-tech, or even on the basic products of the company, with the CEO, COO, CMO, CCO. You'd be run over by a stream of consciousness, flooded with buzzwords, and left wondering if you actually heard anything at all.
9. Totally tone-deaf communication. Fitbit challenges and swag are used to try to boost the morale of the workforce, instead of addressing the real problems.
10. Did I already mention that leadership is incompetent, self-serving, and lacks any passion for what they do?
