Product/business
Core product is not up to par with competitors. PMs get the blame for this, but 1) leadership is unclear on its priorities 2) Many Engineering teams have been understaffed (1-3 engineers for core parts of the product) for years. Choice to move many Engineering teams to cheaper markets (Poland, elsewhere) has strained communication between Engineering & US-based PMs and the organization has been slow to do anything to respond to complaints about the risk & inefficiency this creates. New initiatives have all fizzled so far (though maybe it’s good that the business is willing to recognize a sunk cost fallacy, at some point).
Data
Unclear what the relationship between Data Engineering/ML Analytics is supposed to be. The leadership of the former does their own thing and only brings in Analytics when their plans are 90% done. No VP+ role in data, no career progression for Data Scientists, roles not aligned to industry standards. Just not a mature organization from a data standpoint.
Customer Centricity
It seems like the business is getting further away from customers, not closer. Passbook (closed neobank initiative) was targeted at Mexican immigrants to the US, but run by an all-white team. North America markets drive the business, but over the past year, now very few people in the Business team have ever lived in North America (no one in leadership; run from London). Understanding of customer needs, lives is super uneven across teams.
Leadership
Almost everyone is in their first-ever C-level role. “Stay paranoid” attitude is not playing out in a healthy way. Infighting, scapegoating, excusing bad behavior & mismanagement for favorite directors/VPs is spilling over and corrupting the great culture the company was known for in recent years.
HR
Chaotic. Rife with personal conflicts, toxic personalities allowed to flourish. Turnover is incredibly high in the recruiting, HR Business Partner, and HR ops groups. HR representatives seem to be lacking in some core training around employee conflict resolution, DEI, even labor laws (some HR reps supervise staff in multiple countries). Tendency is for HR reps to make immediate problems go away for Management at the expense of protecting the company. If you’re Level 4 or below, asking HR for help will probably only make things worse.
DEI
“Diverse” candidates be warned. The fact that most of the DEI team left this year tells you what you need to know. Smooth-talking men from well-represented backgrounds & elite schools are strongly encouraged to apply. The company has plenty of data on how bad attrition for women, POC, and people who have taken FMLA is at & above Level 3, they just won’t talk about it. Is it worse than other corporations? TBD, but it’s certainly not better. The progress the former DEI team was making stalled out around IPO time. Being in an employee resource group, particularly in leadership, can feel like wearing a “Troublemaker” label.
Gender: Most engineering teams are all men; where there’s a woman on the team, she’s definitely the one being asked to do all of the team lunch reservations. Women can enjoy the comments about how great their smile is, how emotional they are, but how they’re not very strategic in their performance reviews. It's definitely not like this in every team, but these things happen way more often than they should, and employees have no recourse when they do. Men can get satisfactory performance reviews for shipping nothing, so long as their boss likes them. Underperforming men leave when they get new external jobs. High-performing women get assigned additional tasks like mentoring, recruiting, cultural centricity promotion, & emotional labor-type work that the company will never reward, and then be told they did not drive enough business value at their next review. The departure rate for women at L3 and above (across functions) has visibly accelerated since Q4 2022. Multiple well-respected women who have complained about gender bias issues in the past year have mysteriously had their roles eliminated.
Race: Management has expressed skepticism that ‘diverse’ teams can actually “perform” to managers that make an effort to make the company more representative of the customer base (immigrants). Only a few VP+ leaders are past the ‘I don’t see race and gender’ and ‘I have a black friend/I have a daughter’ level on their DEI learning.
FMLA & Disability, new parents: As another review said, if you need disability accommodations, good luck. Nursing mothers pressured to do non-essential travel, managers told that covid illnesses are not an acceptable reason to push back non-business-critical work. New mothers have had it made clear to them that having a baby and taking leave is the reason they weren’t promoted.
