You'd really have to have a lot to lose (in comparison to just taking a new job) under the current company in order to take that chance (think a large value of options, etc).
You'd have better luck if you already had some sort of existing relationship with the board, but that doesn't really apply if you're asking this question.
You do not want to stand out at these companies. From experience, you will get fired. Morale is at rock bottom, no one is working hard, the only benefit is that expectations are near the limit of nothing so long as you do even the most miniscule actions of value.
Working at Hell Corporation with CEO Satan is incredibly depressing. The reason people don't leave is that interviewers can smell the desperation and downtroddenness. This is coupled with not having written anything except muddy meatballs on top of spaghetti code for your tenure.
Evil CEOs are a feature in these companies. They crush the souls of their workers to prevent them from being able to leave. It usually works long enough for the founders to sell their stakes to a witless VC before the whole operation explodes in a ball of fire.
Very difficult, and frankly pointless. I have seen employees take problems to the board in the past _if_ they already have a working relationship with board members. Otherwise, you are signalling yourself as an employee that cannot successfully work with the company's management. At best, the board will take actions based on your advice, but you will still compromise your own position within the company.
The calculus is simple: in many startups the CEO owns 10-60% of the company. A very senior early employee who negotiated well on options/equity? Optimally <0.5%.
I've been in this situation and fortunately I came to my senses. The board hired a sociopathic CEO who was running the company into the ground and driving away all the good engineers. I came up with a concrete and inexpensive plan for turning the company around which I thought had about a 50/50 chance of making the company so successful it would own its market, which was brand new at the time. It was largely simple stuff like not making the same dumb mistakes over and over.
I thought about taking the plan to the board, and then I realized:
A. The board members talk to the CEO every day, but I've never even met most of them. Who do I think they're going to listen to?
B. Everybody on the board is rich. If those guys lose $50 million they shrug their shoulders, sail to Bermuda for a month of R&R, and get right back on the investing horse.
C. I owe the board members nothing. NOTHING. I was hired as a staff engineer, not as a turnaround expert for a failing company.
D. The most likely outcome of me talking to the board is me getting fired and nothing else changing. In fact that's the only realistic possible outcome.
So I quit. And immediately got a better job. The company continued declining and eventually fired the sociopath CEO but by that time a better company had come along that now owns that market.
Ha reminds me of a previous company I worked at. The amount of exec and employee turnover was horrible. Yet the CEO and company have good ratings on Glassdoor. And the CEO sincerely believes that such turnover is a feature.
Wow this is horrifying. It's time to abandon the ship and take your very valuable skills someplace they will be appreciated. In my experience with people like the CEO described here they are usually people whom are unable to engage in self reflection, but somehow delivering that rating to the CEO to see how miserable his rating is may be a much needed wake up call.
Whole situation sounds like typical startup growing pains and this is the OPs first rodeo of this kind. The original crew of developers was happy during the early days when it was all cozy and limitless upside, but now there's new funding, new bosses, new managers, new processes, new rules, new coworkers that "don't get it" and that old fun and cozy vibe is lost. The new CEO will likely be fired by the board too, but face it, the cozy days are over. So either find yourself a role in that circus that you like, or quit.
I see nothing typical in a terrible CEO that causes such turnover among all the company. Growing pains are communication issues, less transparency, confusing career path, bad onboarding, etc. This is not that.
This is absolutely not normal. If you find yourself relating to this post, please start looking for a new job immediately, I promise it's not like this everywhere.
Having worked at some startups before, there's a difference between folks slowly getting off the boat because "party time is over", and the chaos described by OP.
In the former situation, these people are usually easily replaceable because they weren't committed to start with. I have probably seen over a dozen engineers leaving over the course of a year when more money required better processes and more accountability, and to be frank, nothing really happened.
In the latter though, the high performing, highly committed engineers leave in droves, and create a sort of expertise vacuum that is hard to fill just with new hires.
Yeah, me too. I worked at a place in the 90s that was absolutely going in that direction, but I had no word for the phenomenon.
They were an all Vax/VMS shop in the mid-90s, and they paid developers criminally low wages even for the era. I was hired in an analyst/project management role at a considerably higher salary, which of course made my group unpopular with the dev rank and file.
Turnover was insane -- like, 40% a year in the dev & IT department. Those that stayed were, generally speaking, those that either couldn't conceive of seeking another job, or were unable to do so. This is not a recipe for a functional or high-achieving group even without that by-that-point religious adherence to the party line on (a) the long-term viability of VMS and Digital generally or (b) the wisdom of insisting that damn near everything be built from scratch, even the database system.
It also drives the Dead Sea thing, because to do anything effective in such an environment you have to learn all sorts of esoteric and only-useful-here tech (sometimes even languages!), which takes time you could be using to learn marketable skills.
It's what I think Amazon/AWS is going through now. When they were in "fun growth" mode their obnoxious Bezosisms didn't really matter, but they are settling into an enterprise/utility/long term company. Their raising the bar and stack ranking and forced attrition and blame culture and backstabbing and sacrificial hires won't work.
Instead, they produce a dead sea effect where you aren't getting good people, you're either getting sociopaths or people that don't have options to go elsewhere and not be organizationally abused.
Because if you're good, you can go elsewhere. Other FAANG, etc.
Did you see all the outages in AWS in December? Utilities have long-standing employees because they do long-term support and know the systems. Amazon's hiring does not reward or structure itself that way. It's for churning people.
If you get a creepy impression from the hiring (and Amazon hiring should DEFINITELY do that)... well...
I would say most people that go there are doing it for the resume and they are out within two years. The people I knew who went there were exactly that. Then they cashed out to better jobs.
> The company’s solution was to mass hire to make up for the losses.
Yeah, this company is in life support, then.
There is this other company where there are a handful of the shittiest managers I have ever heard of in my whole career. As a result, most key engineers are leaving, and the company is ramping up hires.
They don't seem to understand that it doesn't matter how many more people you hire, if all the know-how and leadership has vanished already.
> if all the know-how and leadership has vanished already.
The final nail in the coffin after this happening is a software rewrite by the bad quality hired because A) maintaining and extending software is hard 2) it's even harder without any original engineers around to guide designs 3) it's easy to blame people who aren't there for your issues so "the existing software sucks".
My first thought reading this is that I'm happy Glassdoor is actually having an impact.
15 months ago I started work as a Software Manager at a large arts and crafts retailer. Much of the job seemed completely in line with my interest and what I wanted to do, but two weeks in I figured out the place was clownishly toxic and the CTO, despite an impressive educational background, had a cartoonish understanding of how software is made. So I resigned and sought new opportunities. I've never worked less than 18 months at any job, and that made leaving a tough pill to swallow.
Looking at the reviews on Glassdoor (and TeamBlind) left since my departure, I can see my intuitions were spot on. Reviewers' descriptions of the environment seem absurd, but unfortunately they are completely consistent with what my spider-sense was telling me. I hope Glassdoor has helped others avoid the misery of employment there.
I feel like savvy companies can game Glassdoor. Like reviews online, it may be useful to learn what to look for but not so useful as an overall raring.
Glassdoor is like Yelp, bad reviews can be scrubbed for a price. Companies like these may have a noble mission at the start, but housing people's reviews isnt' profitable. Acting as a PR firm however, is.
Feels like it wouldn't be too hard to make a simple review site on IPFS. Have a client based filter for spam - but then the filter can be confirmed by every client by visiting the blacklisted reviews.
Glue reputation information to the reviews. Maybe have an adjustable tool to filter on reputation metrics. Obviously that means the system can be used as an oracle, but it avoids the pay-to-play possibilities.
The way you pitch it makes it sound reassuringly unrealistic, but it's easy to say the same thing in a more palatable way. How about this: Users can see the first page of a company's reviews for free, or pay for a premium account with full access. Companies can pay for access to select the "highlighted" reviews that appear on the first page.
Someone made a claim in a review that I, or someone on my team (it was unclear which from the review), tried to cover up a sexual assault [and some other claims that we were nasty people in general]. Investigative lawyers were hired in relation to the sexual assault cover up claim, and they spent the next few months trying to get to the bottom of what might have happened. In the end, nothing could be found. No person came forward, the lawyers investigated with current and past team members, it was exhausting and painful. A lot of time and money was spent, but we didn't get any sign that the claim was in fact true. The company asked for people to come forward with more information, nothing happened. Further, the original poster from Glassdoor could not be reached, it was a dead end.
At the end of the day, the post survived. The company tried to get it removed yet Glassdoor wanted no part in censoring the claim, despite it being backed by zero evidence. It hurt me, it was difficult to manage with my relationship, my team members...it still upsets me today. I am torn between thinking maybe there was something that happened I didn't know about, and that this is just an angry person trying to cause trouble. I'll possibly never know, but it continues to upset me even now as I write this.
I just went back now and checked, the post has been modified to remove this claim. I know it was there for about 12 months.
So yeah, based on this, I don't know Glassdoor offers the flexibility some imply it does. I don't know what resulted in it finally changing, but the damage is done in my opinion.
I think this comment is a brilliant exposition on how anonymity can be good and bad.
I guess you want leave these things behind and don't make them public, you post an anonymous comment. The worst thing that could have happened is that you are astroturfing for Glassdoor but it's harmless and the sincere tone makes me think that you are not astroturfing.
On the the other hand we also have people who will lie, pretend to be multiple people, cause trouble with no repercussion to their characters.
I have this idea of censorship free web where you have your identity stored but not disclosed. So the content moderators can choose to delete your comments but you can un-delete those if you accept revealing your identity.
So in your situation, you should be able to tell Glassdoor, here is our investigation and we couldn't find anything to indicate that the claims are true therefore please remove this comment. Glassdoor removes the comment and if the poster of the comment is still behind the claims, clicks a button and the comment is restored but this time with the identity exposed.
This way, you can have anonymous comments that can be challenged and the commentators have a mechanism to counter censorship as they have the power to override censorship if they are willing to stake their persona.
They don't even have to be that savvy. I worked for a company that got bought out and the new owners were terrible. The CEO was a friend of the owner, had no experience in the sector at all so he brought in consultants to tell us everything that was wrong with this profitable enterprise, the redundancies and cost-cutting started and people who had been there for years started jumping before they were pushed or just literally stopped working altogether and waited for their redundancy offer. The company started losing money, more cost cutting, that spiral.
The Glassdoor reviews reflected all of this - generally positive until change of ownership, then a steep downhill. This was a while ago and I don't think the new management were even aware of Glassdoor to start off with, but somebody must have showed them because all of a sudden as soon as somebody posted what sounded like a very genuine negative review there would be a corresponding one that was just so glowing they were comical.
This was around the time of the Trip Advisor scandal, after which they quietly dropped the "reviews you can trust" slogan. The two things have stuck in my mind together ever since.
You don't even need to be savvy. I worked for a company that turned out to be really scummy in a number of ways. To combat the terrible ratings on Glassdoor they implemented the most obvious fake review process possible where every week two employees would have to create an account and write a positive review. Of course the reviews people wrote were obvious fakes, just a line of two of meaningless platitudes. They were posted on a consistent schedule for months while pretty much every review of substance was terrible.
After leaving I flagged the fake reviews and reported them to Glassdoor. Glassdoor did absolutely nothing. I tried reporting them again a few months later and again got nowhere. Last I checked the company's page was still full of blatant fake 5 star reviews.
This is why I always check the 1-3 star reviews. If they sound rambling and angry, they're probably just rambling and angry. If they're well-written, I know they're likely the truth.
I've seen company's with Glassdoor reviews similar to your description while job hunting. You see the high star rating and look further, but then start reading and it sticks out like dogs balls. At least I thought so. It was exactly the pattern you described - lots of short pure fluff reviews giving high stars, with long detailed reviews giving low stars. The impression was enough to put me off - but the grapevine later confirmed it.
It was so obvious, I don't see how anybody doing their due diligence during a job search could possibly miss it. Speaking for myself it was the nail in the coffin. A company could get a lot of low star reviews for any number of reasons - maybe they went through a rough patch and had to let go of a lot of people. A company that holds all their best people might not get many reviews at all. In other words, if there aren't hundreds of reviews, I'd take the overall rating with a grain of salt and perhaps go to the interview anyway. But flagrant manipulation like this leaves no doubt. Not only are they prepared to blatantly deceive new employees, it confirms no one likes working there.
Which means the people who do end up being employed there either didn't bother putting in the work, or have a low EQ. Just as painted by the article.
My ex company had a single review for 12 months. The review wasn’t a good one for the company but I didn’t disagree with anything in the review.
My company went through a big hiring spree during the pandemic. They found out about the review from candidate feedback and it was supposedly having a negative effect hiring. Still that single negative interview remained.
Then more negative reviews appeared a few months on from new hires who where treated badly and let go or left.
All off a sudden with a handful of extremely one star negative reviews which I would say are true, factual and reflect the company correctly, the negative reviews disappeared and a stream of five star positive reviews appeared specifically debunking each previous negative point from previous reviews with a positive spin.
I know the company and CEO, the CEO is a text book psychopath. It was fairly obvious he’d written the reviews and somehow got the negative reviews taken down. If it was by contacting Glassdoor or sending threats and lawyer letters to the recent staff who left I don’t know but either wouldn’t surprise me.
Any company on Glassdoor with endless positive reviews I’d treat as suspicious. The useful reviews are the informative negative reviews.
At a previous employer we were asked to do 'anonymous' Glassdoor reviews. Which they scheduled for us to do so that there wouldn't be a glut of reviews.
I just quietly did nothing at all and left shortly after.
At a previous place. The Head of HR emailed everyone to leaving positive reviews, a couple of days after a very negative one appeared. Proper old school astroturfing. Lots of way to game the system
I gather that you didn't look at your employers Glassdoor reviews until after you left?
I'm really confused about your apparent conflict with having quit a toxic employer. Remaining only enables the a##holds to survive by pointing at nice guys like you. So being conflicted about leaving is likely down to the similar kind of human collective survival instinct kicking in that kept the 3rd Reich functioning until the organisational Medusa was finally beheaded.
Surveys like Glassdoor probably (in my hand wavy land of concrete civic ethical computability probably proven, but it does seem necessary to appeal to more than one kind of human evaluation to break chains like these) only contribute to the problem by giving antisocial and anethical CEOs sources for deriving operating limits that I suspect wouldn't work if more good folk such as yourself heeded Glassdoor information prior to accepting employment instead of maintaining a impossible to calibrate open book according to our individual experiences, which we then go right ahead and discount for being outliers based on our total presumptuous imagination that the obscenity of a organisation we're suffering from is actually quite good and normal because obviously we started giving the boss a neutral score because that's what fair unbiased scientific folk do.
That's exactly what fair unbiased scientific folk do also with great results, only every other situation where we apply our fair logic we're using wildly capable arrays of the most sophisticated linearized SI / ANSI calibrated measuring equipment that leverage chains of custody for reference and operating systems maximising the cumulative learning of mankind and human ability to reject misleading but tempting fallacies for fair fact.
I'm stunned at the board's complete lack of awareness.
I would have hoped that any competent board member would want to view metrics around retention and morale, and that large shifts would be something they'd dig into.
Brit here, slightly different topic, but related. American corporate culture scares the crap out of me, I never fully understood why there is such a presenteeism culture. I mean it exists here and in Europe but not to the same extent and where people are just numbers that are hired and fired so easily without workers rights.
This kind of company can't survive long, and aren't very common fortunately. Lots of open positions as well, so no reason to stay either. Mobility is generally a good thing.
That's definitely a cultural thing, and in the US it's generational as well. 50 years ago folks expected to work for a lifetime at the same company, and moving jobs was considered a big red flag.
But today? It's more like a gig economy, where you work at a place long enough to finish a project, then reevaluate. As my buddy Bob says, each year his annual review/raise is an 'offer to stay'. He compares it with what he could get elsewhere, and moves if that's the right decision.
It's easy to overcomplicate this. Why work for someone who is an arsehole? Leave! Why are you worrying about good people not applying because of your bad glass door ratings? Do you actually want good peopel to be exposed to your arsehole CEO? Will they make a difference? No.
Either you make the judgement you can outlast the CEO, or you should be thinking of your career outside of the company.
I think, as a observer, one of the best character traits of American culture is the willingness to topple your leaders. We don't often suffer 16 years of a Prime Minister but did 14 of Thatcher and 12 of Blair. Whereas becoming a Two Term President is still a big deal.
Unfortunately employment market culture of really far more rapidly changing careers than the foundations of the American industrial economy was used to, hasn't gotten updated on the leadership durability model. Which has been grossly extended by special voting rights and the abandonment of embarrassment for misdemeanour leading to resignation which is almost gone as well as the possible reason why metoo etc was so explosive when we realised that some unacceptable behaviour really is unacceptable.
There's more than merely the benefit of the doubt happening here.
>I think, as a observer, one of the best character traits of American culture is the willingness to topple your leaders. We don't often suffer 16 years of a Prime Minister but did 14 of Thatcher and 12 of Blair. Whereas becoming a Two Term President is still a big deal.
Far be it from me to spurn a compliment, but as an American, this seems utterly backwards.
The best thing in a parliamentary system, that is lacking in the US, is the ability to have a vote of confidence and dissolve the government if necessary - the lack of this seems like the structural core of our government's dysfunction, gridlock, two party polarization, and opposition to the will of the people.
Conversely, two terms maximum is just a rule that wasn't always so.
If a politician doesn't lose support, why shouldn't they keep running the government? The important thing is that they do lose control whenever they lose support.
...and the American system may have been more lucky than well-designed historically in not becoming victim to what they call an "autogolpe".
In Australia our leaders often don't even last a full term before being ousted.
It became a bit of a joke but I'd rather the ability for that to happen than not.
Sounds like a company I know. We placed one of our Engineer contractors there - all was well. Then he joined the company (perfectly agreeable all around) and instantly started getting shit on by their CEO. Public criticism of everthing he did; outrageous demands on their time; exclusion from company events for fake emergencies; announcements that his department (consisting of exactly one person, him) was under-performing the other department (12 people) at company meetings.
So he quit; they panicked; he's now a contractor again with double the pay and reporting to a VP he got along with.
That particular lousy "leader" bought your company and thought that the performance of your contract engineer all alone in his company could carry on at the level possible with your company's obviously highly effective employees and engineering engagement environmental support systems.
At least that explains him being isolated..
.. which actually foreshadows the conclusion of this story and even begs for more...
the engineer was employed with expectations of being able to perform like a entire department
obviously the CEO didn't grok his valuation mistake
and that's why after being a unacceptable ahold for a very actionable sounding amount of really lousy leadership level loosing litigation liability lingering low blows, the CEO was prepared to re-hire at double rate
the CEO clearly still believes that the whole department performance deal is possible and merely adjusted his salary and expenses expectations by the minimum I expect he was prepared to pay.
I don't think that the fundamental performance potential for this person and that position is actually unfortunately possible.
only positive possibility I can think of is using the CEOs presumption to hire a sufficient staff to do the work and end up VP/SVP report to the board up from contract engineer in one job half life. I've seen the similar kind of thing done. I presume your former colleague can hire your company back to buy some thinking time as well. If this is a current situation I hope this is some food for thought.
Not sure where all that came from. They simply hired the contract Engineer we were providing. We originally did all their software on the particular product (cockpit display) using four Engineers but when development slowed, they wanted one fulltime and that was our guy. He went from being our employee to being their employee, which is his right. And it spiralled from there.
Anyway he's happy independently contracting now, so alls well that ends well.
Yeah I worked for a dude like this before. He'd come into the office literally in people's faces like screaming at the top of his lungs. He did that to me once and I told him to never talk to me again. If he needs something he can go through my manager.
6 months later the board decided he was too much of a liability and he resigned. He also had several sexual harassment lawsuits against him.
I'm pretty easy-going but also a 6'5" well-off white male, so I'd have no problem dealing with this sort of behaviour (emotional and/or physical) right before I found the door. I feel really bad with how a woman, minority or someone who really needed the pay cheque would have to deal with this.
what does your stature have to do with anything? This is an office settings, all bullying is done verbally, so dealing with this kind of behavior is more about "guts" than physical strength.
Is that true? I thought that a lot of the organs were more often than not about the same size in everyone, so the reason that tall people can appear more willowy and less tall people were more likely to be somewhat barrel shaped was simply that the latter needed to have their organs go someplace.
Also that geriatric people tend to lose height as they age while their innards are the same, thus you get a bit of spread as you get old.
But I never studied this so this may be some stray memory of something misunderstood.
It has a lot to do with it. All of the basic primate social dynamics are pretty obvious in the business world when you look around — ever notice how many C-level types there are who are who are tall, played sports in school, have firm handshakes, etc. whose skills don't match their prominence? Physical intimidation will definitely reinforce an existing power imbalance, at least from the perspective of the lower-ranked person being towered over. Look at things like office furniture — who gets the imposing chair, ends up looking down at people on the other side of a massive desk, etc. — and ask why that's so widespread if it doesn't matter.
> and ask why that's so widespread if it doesn't matter.
Because people like that sort of thing - it's one of the job perks. But if you feel 'towered over' because of it, that's on you. Part of being professional is staying above these silly games.
> But if you feel 'towered over' because of it, that's on you. Part of being professional is staying above these silly games.
Neither of these statements are absolute truths. Physical intimidation is a real effect, and it affects some people disproportionately — a high-status person might not care but someone who already dealing with being one or more degrees out of top status or who has a history of dealing with abuse might notice it more than you think.
Similarly, while it's true that many of us learn to be thick-skinned and ignore things like this, that doesn't mean that it's desirable to have to do so or 100% effective. One of the things you'll learn as you learn more about it is that these small psychological cues can affect you even if you think you're above them and there's a cost to having to think strategically about things like this when the other party can focus their full attention on the surface issue.
Most importantly, almost anyone who is prone to bullying is aware of these dynamics at some level. I'm tall/straight/white/male, never had to worry about finding another job, etc. and I've definitely had interactions where other people afterwards mentioned that they would have been afraid to stand up to someone's bullying because they can't afford the potential backlash. It's like the advice about salary negotiation where people who don't look like me have a LOT more stories about how they tried that with very different results.
If you think you're being routinely physically intimidated to the point of feeling stressed out or even threatened, you should absolutely speak up - those things are horrible and nothing can justify them. But as a professional, your very first reflex when facing such things should be to immediately stand back to regain your physical space, then make it clear to whomever you're confronting that you'll want clear and respectful communication from them and they shouldn't be expecting you to flinch. If this is not enough to make them immediately change their tune, you're in a toxic work environment and should plan on polishing up your resume.
People like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai etc... are not physically intimidating at all. Even if you look at hedge fund managers, a lot of them aren't physically imposing at all. Even looking at world leaders like hitler, stalin, putin, Churchill all of them are short or average height. Modern power isn't about physicality, one person cannot take down even 2 people at once, rather modern notions of power is about control through the exertion of will.
I worked at a company with a comically terrible (criminal) CEO. The year I quit, the company Glassdoor rating went from average to bad due to multiple reviews. Half a year later, after more people quit, I see lots of fake reviews, the worst (accurate) reviews gone, and the rating is back to decent. Apparently, even seemingly good things can be subverted.
While I agree with the advice to leave, this person may be reluctant to leave because their compensation package is not fully vested. There is a famously toxic culture at - uh, you know, a large internet retailer with a prominent web services business - whose primary compensation is/was stock on 2-4 year vesting schedules. I personally know people who had literal heart attacks, mental breakdowns, and other serious and life threatening health consequences that arose as a direct result of staying in that toxic environment too long.
It's not worth it. My friend who had a heart attack at 40 would gladly trade back the $750k in stock he got in exchange. Life is short.
I have had 5 jobs in software in the past 10 years, and the first four were frustrating in different ways. Frustrating coworkers, bad pay, annoying location, dismal office, no vacation -- all different combinations of problems.
My current job, however, at a reasonably well known non-FAANG tech company, is in most ways perfect. I work remotely but have a NYC salary. My coworkers are delightful. The work is stress-free with top-of-the-line work-life balance, flexible PTO and a lot of holidays. I have no complaints.
EXCEPT that it's insanely boring. It's just such meaningless, boring work.
And that's the quandary. I know how stressful and frustrating most jobs are. I know this job is 90% perfect other than leaving me feeling unfulfilled. I know the odds of finding another job with such a combination of factors is very low.
So I stay, even as I see talented engineers moving on as described in the reddit thread and in this one. I'm not staying because I can't get work elsewhere - I'm staying because I don't believe I can find comparably stress-free high-paying work elsewhere.
After having been in 3 very fast growing startups I got completely burnt out. So I got a job like the one you are describing: The pay is basically double of what I was making before, it is absolutely out of all proportion for my home country and the team is amazing. However it is also quite boring as well, I've never been in a "largish" slow phase company. I am enjoying the ride because once this is over, I know I won't be able to get a similar job elsewhere.
Start a side hustle to scratch your itch? Assuming you mean unfulfilled in a technical sense. Of course you could also mean family and friends, which is outside of work anyway.
A very large inernational engineering company hires lots of new grads, one of them a former co-worker of mine who described how her boss told her "You're like an orange; we'll squeeze all the juice out of you until there's nothing left but pulp and peel, then you'll quit or we'll throw you away". I guess this could also describe most law firms and management consultancies as well. Is it better or worse when it's systemic and not just an a-hole CEO?
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadI mean, you fairly quickly see where this is going to lead. Why stay in a sinking ship?
The normal solution is to go out and get a new job -> I've done that with crazy bosses. Very simple. You can even leave on OK terms.
You'd have better luck if you already had some sort of existing relationship with the board, but that doesn't really apply if you're asking this question.
Working at Hell Corporation with CEO Satan is incredibly depressing. The reason people don't leave is that interviewers can smell the desperation and downtroddenness. This is coupled with not having written anything except muddy meatballs on top of spaghetti code for your tenure.
Evil CEOs are a feature in these companies. They crush the souls of their workers to prevent them from being able to leave. It usually works long enough for the founders to sell their stakes to a witless VC before the whole operation explodes in a ball of fire.
The calculus is simple: in many startups the CEO owns 10-60% of the company. A very senior early employee who negotiated well on options/equity? Optimally <0.5%.
I thought about taking the plan to the board, and then I realized:
A. The board members talk to the CEO every day, but I've never even met most of them. Who do I think they're going to listen to?
B. Everybody on the board is rich. If those guys lose $50 million they shrug their shoulders, sail to Bermuda for a month of R&R, and get right back on the investing horse.
C. I owe the board members nothing. NOTHING. I was hired as a staff engineer, not as a turnaround expert for a failing company.
D. The most likely outcome of me talking to the board is me getting fired and nothing else changing. In fact that's the only realistic possible outcome.
So I quit. And immediately got a better job. The company continued declining and eventually fired the sociopath CEO but by that time a better company had come along that now owns that market.
You can't fix stupid. All you can do is leave.
Is it "normal" for a company to stay "cozy and limitless upside" even as it grows to hundreds of employees?
>If you find yourself relating to this post, please start looking for a new job immediately
The parent post literally mentions quitting as one option.
No it isn't, but that's not relevant to this discussion. Nobody made any claim of limitless upside.
> The parent post literally mentions quitting as one option.
Yes, but it implied you're likely to find the same thing anywhere that's not a super early stage startup, which is not true.
Telling OP to ignore the writing on the wall and show loyalty to a toxic leader is not good advice.
Having worked at some startups before, there's a difference between folks slowly getting off the boat because "party time is over", and the chaos described by OP.
In the former situation, these people are usually easily replaceable because they weren't committed to start with. I have probably seen over a dozen engineers leaving over the course of a year when more money required better processes and more accountability, and to be frank, nothing really happened.
In the latter though, the high performing, highly committed engineers leave in droves, and create a sort of expertise vacuum that is hard to fill just with new hires.
They were an all Vax/VMS shop in the mid-90s, and they paid developers criminally low wages even for the era. I was hired in an analyst/project management role at a considerably higher salary, which of course made my group unpopular with the dev rank and file.
Turnover was insane -- like, 40% a year in the dev & IT department. Those that stayed were, generally speaking, those that either couldn't conceive of seeking another job, or were unable to do so. This is not a recipe for a functional or high-achieving group even without that by-that-point religious adherence to the party line on (a) the long-term viability of VMS and Digital generally or (b) the wisdom of insisting that damn near everything be built from scratch, even the database system.
NIH is literally software cancer. We've done it dozens of times and it hasn't worked once...
Instead, they produce a dead sea effect where you aren't getting good people, you're either getting sociopaths or people that don't have options to go elsewhere and not be organizationally abused.
Because if you're good, you can go elsewhere. Other FAANG, etc.
Did you see all the outages in AWS in December? Utilities have long-standing employees because they do long-term support and know the systems. Amazon's hiring does not reward or structure itself that way. It's for churning people.
If you get a creepy impression from the hiring (and Amazon hiring should DEFINITELY do that)... well...
I would say most people that go there are doing it for the resume and they are out within two years. The people I knew who went there were exactly that. Then they cashed out to better jobs.
Yeah, this company is in life support, then.
There is this other company where there are a handful of the shittiest managers I have ever heard of in my whole career. As a result, most key engineers are leaving, and the company is ramping up hires.
They don't seem to understand that it doesn't matter how many more people you hire, if all the know-how and leadership has vanished already.
The final nail in the coffin after this happening is a software rewrite by the bad quality hired because A) maintaining and extending software is hard 2) it's even harder without any original engineers around to guide designs 3) it's easy to blame people who aren't there for your issues so "the existing software sucks".
I've seen this happen a few times.
15 months ago I started work as a Software Manager at a large arts and crafts retailer. Much of the job seemed completely in line with my interest and what I wanted to do, but two weeks in I figured out the place was clownishly toxic and the CTO, despite an impressive educational background, had a cartoonish understanding of how software is made. So I resigned and sought new opportunities. I've never worked less than 18 months at any job, and that made leaving a tough pill to swallow.
Looking at the reviews on Glassdoor (and TeamBlind) left since my departure, I can see my intuitions were spot on. Reviewers' descriptions of the environment seem absurd, but unfortunately they are completely consistent with what my spider-sense was telling me. I hope Glassdoor has helped others avoid the misery of employment there.
Honestly might be a fun weekend project...
Someone made a claim in a review that I, or someone on my team (it was unclear which from the review), tried to cover up a sexual assault [and some other claims that we were nasty people in general]. Investigative lawyers were hired in relation to the sexual assault cover up claim, and they spent the next few months trying to get to the bottom of what might have happened. In the end, nothing could be found. No person came forward, the lawyers investigated with current and past team members, it was exhausting and painful. A lot of time and money was spent, but we didn't get any sign that the claim was in fact true. The company asked for people to come forward with more information, nothing happened. Further, the original poster from Glassdoor could not be reached, it was a dead end.
At the end of the day, the post survived. The company tried to get it removed yet Glassdoor wanted no part in censoring the claim, despite it being backed by zero evidence. It hurt me, it was difficult to manage with my relationship, my team members...it still upsets me today. I am torn between thinking maybe there was something that happened I didn't know about, and that this is just an angry person trying to cause trouble. I'll possibly never know, but it continues to upset me even now as I write this.
I just went back now and checked, the post has been modified to remove this claim. I know it was there for about 12 months.
So yeah, based on this, I don't know Glassdoor offers the flexibility some imply it does. I don't know what resulted in it finally changing, but the damage is done in my opinion.
I guess you want leave these things behind and don't make them public, you post an anonymous comment. The worst thing that could have happened is that you are astroturfing for Glassdoor but it's harmless and the sincere tone makes me think that you are not astroturfing.
On the the other hand we also have people who will lie, pretend to be multiple people, cause trouble with no repercussion to their characters.
I have this idea of censorship free web where you have your identity stored but not disclosed. So the content moderators can choose to delete your comments but you can un-delete those if you accept revealing your identity.
So in your situation, you should be able to tell Glassdoor, here is our investigation and we couldn't find anything to indicate that the claims are true therefore please remove this comment. Glassdoor removes the comment and if the poster of the comment is still behind the claims, clicks a button and the comment is restored but this time with the identity exposed.
This way, you can have anonymous comments that can be challenged and the commentators have a mechanism to counter censorship as they have the power to override censorship if they are willing to stake their persona.
Their approval raiting for the ceo was 80%, recommend to a friend in the 60%s.
The reviews were vague but still pointed out staginating business and one even mentioned that the ceo was like a drunk pilot.
The Glassdoor reviews reflected all of this - generally positive until change of ownership, then a steep downhill. This was a while ago and I don't think the new management were even aware of Glassdoor to start off with, but somebody must have showed them because all of a sudden as soon as somebody posted what sounded like a very genuine negative review there would be a corresponding one that was just so glowing they were comical.
This was around the time of the Trip Advisor scandal, after which they quietly dropped the "reviews you can trust" slogan. The two things have stuck in my mind together ever since.
After leaving I flagged the fake reviews and reported them to Glassdoor. Glassdoor did absolutely nothing. I tried reporting them again a few months later and again got nowhere. Last I checked the company's page was still full of blatant fake 5 star reviews.
It was so obvious, I don't see how anybody doing their due diligence during a job search could possibly miss it. Speaking for myself it was the nail in the coffin. A company could get a lot of low star reviews for any number of reasons - maybe they went through a rough patch and had to let go of a lot of people. A company that holds all their best people might not get many reviews at all. In other words, if there aren't hundreds of reviews, I'd take the overall rating with a grain of salt and perhaps go to the interview anyway. But flagrant manipulation like this leaves no doubt. Not only are they prepared to blatantly deceive new employees, it confirms no one likes working there.
Which means the people who do end up being employed there either didn't bother putting in the work, or have a low EQ. Just as painted by the article.
My company went through a big hiring spree during the pandemic. They found out about the review from candidate feedback and it was supposedly having a negative effect hiring. Still that single negative interview remained.
Then more negative reviews appeared a few months on from new hires who where treated badly and let go or left.
All off a sudden with a handful of extremely one star negative reviews which I would say are true, factual and reflect the company correctly, the negative reviews disappeared and a stream of five star positive reviews appeared specifically debunking each previous negative point from previous reviews with a positive spin.
I know the company and CEO, the CEO is a text book psychopath. It was fairly obvious he’d written the reviews and somehow got the negative reviews taken down. If it was by contacting Glassdoor or sending threats and lawyer letters to the recent staff who left I don’t know but either wouldn’t surprise me.
Any company on Glassdoor with endless positive reviews I’d treat as suspicious. The useful reviews are the informative negative reviews.
I just quietly did nothing at all and left shortly after.
I'm really confused about your apparent conflict with having quit a toxic employer. Remaining only enables the a##holds to survive by pointing at nice guys like you. So being conflicted about leaving is likely down to the similar kind of human collective survival instinct kicking in that kept the 3rd Reich functioning until the organisational Medusa was finally beheaded.
Surveys like Glassdoor probably (in my hand wavy land of concrete civic ethical computability probably proven, but it does seem necessary to appeal to more than one kind of human evaluation to break chains like these) only contribute to the problem by giving antisocial and anethical CEOs sources for deriving operating limits that I suspect wouldn't work if more good folk such as yourself heeded Glassdoor information prior to accepting employment instead of maintaining a impossible to calibrate open book according to our individual experiences, which we then go right ahead and discount for being outliers based on our total presumptuous imagination that the obscenity of a organisation we're suffering from is actually quite good and normal because obviously we started giving the boss a neutral score because that's what fair unbiased scientific folk do.
That's exactly what fair unbiased scientific folk do also with great results, only every other situation where we apply our fair logic we're using wildly capable arrays of the most sophisticated linearized SI / ANSI calibrated measuring equipment that leverage chains of custody for reference and operating systems maximising the cumulative learning of mankind and human ability to reject misleading but tempting fallacies for fair fact.
After only two weeks (and having never experienced such a thing before), it seems pretty natural to second guess one’s intuition.
I would have hoped that any competent board member would want to view metrics around retention and morale, and that large shifts would be something they'd dig into.
But today? It's more like a gig economy, where you work at a place long enough to finish a project, then reevaluate. As my buddy Bob says, each year his annual review/raise is an 'offer to stay'. He compares it with what he could get elsewhere, and moves if that's the right decision.
Either you make the judgement you can outlast the CEO, or you should be thinking of your career outside of the company.
Unfortunately employment market culture of really far more rapidly changing careers than the foundations of the American industrial economy was used to, hasn't gotten updated on the leadership durability model. Which has been grossly extended by special voting rights and the abandonment of embarrassment for misdemeanour leading to resignation which is almost gone as well as the possible reason why metoo etc was so explosive when we realised that some unacceptable behaviour really is unacceptable.
There's more than merely the benefit of the doubt happening here.
Far be it from me to spurn a compliment, but as an American, this seems utterly backwards.
The best thing in a parliamentary system, that is lacking in the US, is the ability to have a vote of confidence and dissolve the government if necessary - the lack of this seems like the structural core of our government's dysfunction, gridlock, two party polarization, and opposition to the will of the people.
Conversely, two terms maximum is just a rule that wasn't always so.
If a politician doesn't lose support, why shouldn't they keep running the government? The important thing is that they do lose control whenever they lose support.
...and the American system may have been more lucky than well-designed historically in not becoming victim to what they call an "autogolpe".
So he quit; they panicked; he's now a contractor again with double the pay and reporting to a VP he got along with.
At least that explains him being isolated..
.. which actually foreshadows the conclusion of this story and even begs for more...
the engineer was employed with expectations of being able to perform like a entire department
obviously the CEO didn't grok his valuation mistake
and that's why after being a unacceptable ahold for a very actionable sounding amount of really lousy leadership level loosing litigation liability lingering low blows, the CEO was prepared to re-hire at double rate
the CEO clearly still believes that the whole department performance deal is possible and merely adjusted his salary and expenses expectations by the minimum I expect he was prepared to pay.
I don't think that the fundamental performance potential for this person and that position is actually unfortunately possible.
only positive possibility I can think of is using the CEOs presumption to hire a sufficient staff to do the work and end up VP/SVP report to the board up from contract engineer in one job half life. I've seen the similar kind of thing done. I presume your former colleague can hire your company back to buy some thinking time as well. If this is a current situation I hope this is some food for thought.
Anyway he's happy independently contracting now, so alls well that ends well.
6 months later the board decided he was too much of a liability and he resigned. He also had several sexual harassment lawsuits against him.
Also that geriatric people tend to lose height as they age while their innards are the same, thus you get a bit of spread as you get old.
But I never studied this so this may be some stray memory of something misunderstood.
Because people like that sort of thing - it's one of the job perks. But if you feel 'towered over' because of it, that's on you. Part of being professional is staying above these silly games.
Neither of these statements are absolute truths. Physical intimidation is a real effect, and it affects some people disproportionately — a high-status person might not care but someone who already dealing with being one or more degrees out of top status or who has a history of dealing with abuse might notice it more than you think.
Similarly, while it's true that many of us learn to be thick-skinned and ignore things like this, that doesn't mean that it's desirable to have to do so or 100% effective. One of the things you'll learn as you learn more about it is that these small psychological cues can affect you even if you think you're above them and there's a cost to having to think strategically about things like this when the other party can focus their full attention on the surface issue.
Most importantly, almost anyone who is prone to bullying is aware of these dynamics at some level. I'm tall/straight/white/male, never had to worry about finding another job, etc. and I've definitely had interactions where other people afterwards mentioned that they would have been afraid to stand up to someone's bullying because they can't afford the potential backlash. It's like the advice about salary negotiation where people who don't look like me have a LOT more stories about how they tried that with very different results.
Looks like it's time.
It's not worth it. My friend who had a heart attack at 40 would gladly trade back the $750k in stock he got in exchange. Life is short.
I still had nightmares many months after I left that place.
I have had 5 jobs in software in the past 10 years, and the first four were frustrating in different ways. Frustrating coworkers, bad pay, annoying location, dismal office, no vacation -- all different combinations of problems.
My current job, however, at a reasonably well known non-FAANG tech company, is in most ways perfect. I work remotely but have a NYC salary. My coworkers are delightful. The work is stress-free with top-of-the-line work-life balance, flexible PTO and a lot of holidays. I have no complaints.
EXCEPT that it's insanely boring. It's just such meaningless, boring work.
And that's the quandary. I know how stressful and frustrating most jobs are. I know this job is 90% perfect other than leaving me feeling unfulfilled. I know the odds of finding another job with such a combination of factors is very low.
So I stay, even as I see talented engineers moving on as described in the reddit thread and in this one. I'm not staying because I can't get work elsewhere - I'm staying because I don't believe I can find comparably stress-free high-paying work elsewhere.