Not paid enough to deal with this nonsense - Anonymous employee Gen Employee Review

The New York office dynamic, largely inherited from the MoneyLion acquisition, is, at best, emotionally draining. The open-floor layout is dominated by individuals who unabashedly take calls at their desks with zero self-awareness. Furthermore, there is a pervasive and vindictive "call-out" culture. When an error occurs, instead of messaging the responsible team directly, screenshots are taken and team members are publicly lambasted. This creates an environment of constant policing. It is impossible for a "fail fast" mentality to succeed when mistakes are met with finger-pointing rather than constructive collaboration. The culture here is incredibly performative, and the personalities that succeed are often those who step on others to get ahead. Some of the most unkind, incapable, and paradoxically condescending people are handed high-visibility projects simply because they make the most noise. For a company that claims to be fast-moving, there are far too many "squeaky wheel" types. In particular, certain teams act as if they are entirely ruled by strategy and market research, only to deliver lackluster launches and propose strategies tied to vague, qualitative measures rather than actual data. Paradoxically, these are the exact same teams that interject the most into other departments' business. They derail every meeting to ask asinine questions that do not move things forward. It doesn’t matter if you actually understand the project; if they don't, they will force an unnecessary meeting onto your calendar late on a Friday afternoon or during lunch to review an administrative deck that could have easily been an email. This performative nature extends to the Return to Office (RTO) policy. There is no clear operational rationale behind it, yet badge swipes are strictly tracked weekly to ensure you are in the building the "right" amount of times. If you need to be remote for a brief period, people question you, and the process to utilize the advertised "work from anywhere" days is unnecessarily dramatic. I have seen manipulative managers hold remote days hostage or pressure employees to log on during PTO. Asking for flexibility should not be an intimidating conversation. While leadership pays lip service to work-life balance, individual contributors are praised for staying up late on Friday nights doing non-urgent work. Additionally, professional boundaries are frequently blurred; much of the social culture revolves around happy hours where heavy drinking is common, making it an uncomfortable environment for anyone who prefers to keep their work and personal lives separate. When team members are let go or quit, their workload is assigned to the remaining staff like items distributed from a will. Management consistently ignores staffing concerns until burnout has already taken a toll. Leadership does not care about properly integrating the teams they absorb through acquisitions. Instead, it is "RIF central"—disguised under the corporate euphemism of a “reset” for efficiency. Colleagues are laid off with just a few weeks' notice but are expected to maintain normal productivity right up until their final hour. This lack of empathy is mirrored in leadership's obsession with AI, which is actively being pushed to replace people’s roles in real time. It is one thing to leverage technology to automate mundane tasks, but the way AI is championed here is disheartening. Employees are forced to engage in productivity theater, dropping "AI" into every conversation just to look plugged in for metrics tracking. Meanwhile, executive leadership remains entirely out of touch. The CEO routinely cracks inappropriate jokes during All Hands meetings while the staff is visibly burnt out, and other C Suite members insert themselves into product launches without a basic understanding of the underlying technology. On top of these cultural issues, compensation is well below market rate. Offering 3-4% "merit" increases in this economic climate amounts to a net pay cut, yet management patronizingly expects employees to be grateful for it. Ultimately, Gen operates under a facade of innovation and efficiency, but the reality for individual contributors is a bureaucratic, high-stress environment defined by optics rather than output. If you are looking for a collaborative workspace where hard work is recognized, boundaries are respected, and leadership genuinely values its people, I would strongly advise looking elsewhere. This is a corporate environment that consumes talent to fuel its own administrative noise, leaving little room for actual professional growth.