— Incredibly poor communication: I worked on massive, important projects at Deepgram and never had full context about what was happening or why. Even when the projects wrapped up, I still didn't know what the goals of the project were, or why it was so rushed. All I know is how much it burnt out the employees being asked to rush it. — Toxic culture: I truly believe Deepgram thinks it's building a company with a good culture, but they're wrong. The culture encourages calling people out, often quite rudely, on public Slack channels, which is explained as "just asking questions" and "part of how we work". One other example: while people from several different departments were working extended hours to complete a project on arbitrarily short deadlines, leadership was posting in Slack about how they were taking extended vacations, encouraging everyone else to do the same. How are people supposed to take vacations if they're being forced to work excessive hours to complete projects on unreasonable deadlines? — Complete lack of leadership: The company has a "let people discuss and figure things out" mentality, but that simply doesn't work with a company this large—and, let's face it, at Deepgram the CEO is going to show up and tell you you're doing it wrong anyway, so all of the discussion and negotiation doesn't actually matter in the end. — Termination-happy: I've never worked at a company this small that fired so many people while I worked there.
