A manager is someone hired or promoted into a role that makes decisions and dictates the work of employees under them. A true leader is someone that individuals observe and follow voluntarily, trusting their decisions and working with the inspiration of a shared goal. This company has a whole lot of manager and very, very few leaders. In the last All Hands, the CEO directly addressed other reviews on this site, saying that some were just mean and had no meaningful advice. Scrolling through, however, I do see an "Advice for Management" section with overwhelmingly resounding themes that would really help right the ship. Unfortunately HR's take is that GlassDoor represents "90% former employees" and therefore isn't actionable. Confusing, I agree. The last all hands meeting paved the way for blissfully ignoring that advice. It also happened to be the all hands where we go over the annual employee survey results, in which leadership displayed a slide for less than three seconds that showed that nearly 50% of current engineering employees rated the company negatively, attempting to wax poetic over the slides in a positive light that landed with a hollow thud. Don't believe me? Here's what happened next. A "fireside chat" with the new CTO followed the rushed display of employee sentiment in which we took up the time of all 400+ employees to, quite literally, ask the CTO "cats or dogs? favorite foods? morning or night person?". In the middle of this, an employee dropped in the zoom chat that this felt incredibly tone deaf, and that we were glossing over the massive issue of morale (or, what the CEO calls "mojo"). We then saw more "this" emoji reactions than I've ever seen in my life. Clearly several people in the all hands PUT THEIR NAMES on their reactions saying "this is tone deaf, let's talk about the real issues". And, sadly, we won't. Not in a meaningful way, anyway. We've been asked to provide less anonymous feedback and attach our names to things, and to employees credit, I've seen it happen. Unfortunately, I've seen employees ask honest questions of leadership in town hall settings that don't receive a real response, but DO receive a meeting with HR about "communication style". Management, if you're really that sensitive about honest questions regarding your business decisions, maybe management isn't for you. In 2023, we've seen dozens of employees let go or demoted with no real consequence on the executive management that allocated the position, hired the person, and then proceeded to pull several rugs out from under them. Layoffs, attrition, and outright firings have heavily disproportionally affected diverse employees. We have a company with a cool idea and talented employees, and executive management just can't figure out what to do with it. We have too many key people that have been here forever who make bad decisions and enforce poorly researched opinions on the tech org. We then hire truly talent raising staff engineers who say "that's a bad decision and here's why." No response, follow the rules. We're really trying to spin our wheels in a bog of sunk cost fallacy.
