When I Work Reviews

There is a complete lack of clear direction in every department. The lack of alignment within senior leadership bleeds down to every level. People are competitive and not collaborative and most work revolves around elevating some internal resume for fear of losing one's job, not to elevate the product or customer experience. High turnover (both voluntary and involuntary). The last estimate at 10% I saw on here is WAY low. Last I checked it was 25% in the last year. If you want to make an impact this is a very frustrating environment however if politicking, people pleasing and accepting the status quo suit you, this is the place. Regular bouts of open public crying in front of management is considered normal. Any questioning or asking why is considered abrasive and not being a team player.

In 2020 the company laid off around 50% of their engineering department and more lost to turnover (which is still ongoing today). The leadership that took over, combined with understaffing, destroyed the culture in engineering from that point forward and it has never recovered. For example: - Engineers are expected to do the workload of multiple full time roles. Since the layoffs the amount of work that is expected from engineers has actually increased as the company remains a "feature factory". Employees are not permitted to request for more resources, and if people are actually hired the overall workload continues to increase so that everyone is always underwater. - Pay is low for Minneapolis, and extremely low compared to remote positions. Raises are minuscule (less than cost of living) and in 2020 there were no raises at all (along with 401k matches being cut for the bulk of the year). Additionally there is no bonus structure whatsoever. This is all while management says the company is doing great financially and everything is perfect. - Managers do not trust engineers. There is not a single Slack room that is not closely monitored by a manager. Micromanagement, and constant status updates are common. 7 status update meetings in a 5 day work week is expected. With the move to remote, middle management’s main goal has been to justify their existence. - Managers have no faith in the product the engineers are building. For example, employees have to request time off via a third party application when requesting time off is a main function of the When I Work app itself. That is just one example that speaks volumes on how they actually think about what is being built. - Tons of technical debt, bad processes, Dark Scrum, and impossible deadlines. Features for the entire year are already set with exact dates. Daily standups are controlled by your direct report manager. This is not an engineer driven culture whatsoever. - Managers refused to do their jobs. When you asked them to make a simple management decision they refused and then pushed it on you. This was done so they never had to face any actual responsibility. - Tools, process changes, and architectural changes appear out of thin air with no prior discussion and you are immediately expected to be an expert on them the first time they are encountered. This shows how poor communication is across teams. - Employees are afraid to speak openly, or really just speak at all. I have 30 Slack channels open and maybe 4 of them would have messages from human beings per day. If there was something that could be better or improved, you are immediately shut down in a very passive aggressive way if you bring it up. This leads to a culture where people don't say anything for fear of retaliation from management (which was known to do just that). Ask yourself, how does a company go from in office to primarily communicating over Slack and Slack usage drastically goes down?