Pros
- Most people at Dutchie are incredibly kind and sincere people. Some of the best coworkers I’ve ever had. - Flexible work schedule. If you aren’t in a front-line role, you’re able to work whenever you want, as long as you get your work done. - Generally good benefits/perks for a start-up. - Working on the cannabis movement can be really fun and exciting, despite the problematic industry (see below).
Cons
Where do I start…. I have many specific details I’d love to share, but in an effort to be as objective as possible with my feedback, I will try to summarize succinctly the core issues I noticed while I was a Dutchie employee. - Extremely male-dominated company. About 2/3’s of the employee base are men and the ratio is even worse if you’re in Engineering/Product/Design. I was almost always the only woman or one of two women in group meetings. - Leadership is incredibly frustrating to work with. When I say “leadership”, I mean executive leadership and product leadership. To provide a few specifics: micromanaging, many levels of gatekeeping to get approval on projects, not open to feedback, no trust in their employees to make decisions. Leadership really soured my entire opinion and experience with the company which is unfortunate because most people at Dutchie are awesome. - No culture of career development and prioritization of professional growth. Very low expectations for managers to grow their direct reports. I never felt like my manager was on my side or cared about my career path. There were many, many people way overdue for a promotion and endless excuses about why folks weren’t getting promoted. - Low compensation. Everyone on my team was getting paid below industry standard for our roles. We all knew it because we shared our salaries with each other, so this isn't speculation. Despite this, leadership had very high expectations and required us to deliver work that was essentially a level above our pay band, all while underpaying us for our current level. Also, support reps all start at $40k/year - which is NOT a livable wage. personally, I think you can tell a lot about a company by the way they treat their support team and it's horrible that Dutchie is offering a wage they fully know means their employees will struggle to live off. They can do better and have decided not to. - Lay-offs for 10% of the company. They did an immense amount of hiring in a year (hundreds of new hires) and acquired two companies, so they grew from ~120 people to ~800 in 1 year. Then they laid-off ~70 people and the CEO tells everyone that Dutchie is doing great and will keep hiring, but in the same breath he says they have to let 70 people go. They had the audacity to say people were selected based on performance when there were many, many folks that were recently hired, promoted, or otherwise doing wonderfully in their role. - Emotionally immature CEO (Ross). I thought really highly of Ross for a long time because he comes across as a really nice guy in all-hands meetings. Over time, I got to work more closely with him and I was really disappointed with his integrity as a leader. He will talk circles around you without providing space to hear your thoughts and doesn’t solicit feedback from others in the room. He doesn’t recognize or vocalize his appreciation for the hand work his employees are doing on his behalf. I’ve worked with many executive leaders that have majorly impressed me with their moral integrity so I’m confident that I’ve had great examples of what amazing leadership looks like. The conversations I had with Ross always left me feeling infuriated and questioning whether or not I should stay. - The CPO (Zach) doesn’t act like a CPO - he is way too involved in every product initiative. Zach plays the role of co-founder, CPO, designer, product manager, and people manager. He single-handedly leads product initiatives as both the designer and PM, instead of putting important growth opportunities in front of his direct reports. He doesn’t seem to trust anyone to make design or product decisions and wants to give final approval on almost everything (for example, approving copy on a landing page). This majorly slows things down and causes frustration because he doesn’t follow the typical product workflows everyone has worked hard to establish and adhere to. He’s also extremely critical of other’s work and doesn’t solicit or receive feedback well. He always thinks he’s in the right and it’s very difficult to change his mind. - Performative DEI efforts. Despite ongoing feedback from many, many folks in the company, they refused to hire a full-time person so own Social Impact efforts at the company or establish a company-wide OKR to prioritize social equity initiatives. The one black woman on the executive leadership team left in less than a year, which is a a huge red flag to me. - The plan is always changing. This is true at most start-ups, but I witnessed Dutchie make a few (yes more than one or two!) major changes in strategic direction that resulted in a huge waste of time/effort/money. It caused a ton of thrash on several teams and many people were upset to have projects they worked on for months get scrapped, only to be picked up again later - and then scrapped again. Really frustrating and made all of us question leadership’s long-term strategic thinking. - Systemic racism and sexism that is going unaddressed. To be blunt, I don’t think this is a good place to work if you’re a non-white male. I knew several women that got very gendered/sexist feedback and experienced that myself. There was also some major pay inequity issues for a few POC colleagues. One specific example of sexism is that the highest-level woman software engineer was a Senior Manager. No female representation for Director level and above. - Not a data-driven culture. Dutchie talks a big game, saying “data is in our DNA”, but it’s actually really difficult to get the data you need and decisions are made based on the leadership team’s opinion. - Not Dutchie specific, but the cannabis industry is very problematic. Sexism and racism are rampant. The production of cannabis is incredibly wasteful and bad for the environment. You have to be at-peace with the fact that you’re making money off cannabis while thousands of people (mostly young black men) are sitting in prison for cannabis offenses. It’s exciting to be able to help confront these issues and be part of the solution so this isn’t necessarily a huge con, but I’ll warn you that it does wear on you over time if these are topics you care about.