Numbers over people:
After working for Segment for quite some time, I've noticed the changes to how Segment once was to how they are now. Once they brought in new leadership, the culture changed from feeling fun, innovative and start-up like to corporate. Leaders were only looking at numbers and deliverables. Yes, as they should, but they lost the human element and looked at people as workers who were dispensable and did not try to invest in them. If they really cared about their people, they would have more developmental conversations (outside of performance reviews), managers would give ongoing feedback, and managers would be more available for their team. The leadership team expects their employees to succeed on their own, without their guidance and if an employee messes up, they will immediately start to blame it on the employee and not look at themselves as the issue. Segment needs to hold managers accountable just like their non-managers.
When “corporate-like” leaders come in, they bring in people just like them and that’s when it starts being ruthless. Teammates never give direct feedback. They only go to their coworker’s manager to give feedback. For a place that wants people to always give direct feedback, there are employees who don’t follow that and are just throwing people under the bus to make themselves feel and look better.
Diversity:
They can preach about how they want a diverse population, but nothing they say matters when they have nothing to show for it. They only have a handful of black employees, most of the minority hires were contractors, their sales team is filled with straight white men, and barely any women in leadership. Their board is also not diverse at all and you can tell diversity is at the bottom of their list. You see a lot of white people being favored over non-white people, just by the feedback my colleagues have received and the passive aggressiveness people have experienced, if you are non-white. I want to also point out that Segment’s People teams are supposed to be the most diverse, when they’re just filled with white women. Being a white woman in People is the majority, not minority. That’s not good enough especially if they are the ones advocating for diversity. Do better.
Transparency:
I was there to witness the layoffs and that was done out of no where. The leadership team kept on mentioning that employees had nothing to worry about, then the layoffs suddenly happened. They let go of a lot of great people that have been loyal to Segment for years. The employees who were "lucky" enough to stay, were struggling to pick up the pieces because of the lack of preparedness. It's kind of strange how there were layoffs, but they continue to still hire. It seems to me like they were trying to clean ship and call it a "lay off" when they probably didn't even need to do that. They should've tried everything they could to save money before going down that route, like temporarily cutting the e-team's salaries or maybe put a pause on hiring like other companies? I'm sure the employees who were laid off felt undervalued and taken advantage of when they noticed Segment was not slowing down hiring while and after layoffs. No wonder a lot of people have left on their own since then.
