Now the bad stuff.
Arcules is a startup. It is a well-funded one, but it is still a startup. All the sense of uncertainty and instability that comes with working for a startup is felt every month as the sales numbers fluctuate (or worse, stay completely stagnant).
We had managed to survive a number of critical junctions that risked the fate of the entire company but the race is far from over; There are at least dozens more to come in the near future, with bigger stakes. Every successful checkpoint or stage gate was a hard-won battle that demanded the sacrifice of sleep and weekends for many of its staff, and there is a constant stream of miniature scale battles that must be won every week. Thankfully, the organization has matured over the years and taken some valuable lessons to heart, but it still has a long series of obstacles to overcome.
There is an overarching sense of chaos and disorganization hidden away at every corner, especially in the product/engineering department. Whether it is the half-baked process where nobody knows who owns a piece of the requirement, or the daily communication mishaps that inevitably results in details getting lost, the department as a whole is perpetually mired in a state of confusion and nobody seems to know what to do about it.
Lastly, the departures. For whatever reason Arcules has been hemorrhaging engineering talent for the past few months. What started as a few farewells have turned into a small-scale exodus, and the sense of doom it generated has formed a festering wound threatening to decay the entire office morale. There is an ongoing effort to replace the departures and reverse the trend, but the current state of affairs remain grim.
