A company living off a reputation it no longer deserves - Program Manager Highlight Technologies Employee Review

The pay philosophy is basically “be grateful you have a job,” and that bleeds into everything. In my experience, 2 to 4 percent annual raises were treated like some heroic act of generosity, while the company talked a big game about development and career growth. The “professional development” process felt like a checkbox exercise, and a lot of roles ended up siloed, which makes it hard to build new skills or move laterally unless you are very good at office politics. If you are motivated and want a clear path forward, you may find yourself doing more hoping than progressing. The bigger issue is what happened after leadership changed. New CEO, Aarish, took over and immediately it felt like the culture shifted from “we are in this together” to “prove you deserve to be here,” fast. I cannot verify what the new CEO’s popularity is across the entire company, but I can say morale around leadership decisions seemed to drop sharply in my circles. There was a lot of nitpicking about work habits and pressure to push harder, meanwhile this guy is taking his family on a lavish 2-week tropical vacation within his first month on the job. When DOGE-related cuts became necessary, the layoffs were handled with stunning callousness. Nearly a decade of service was rewarded with a single month of severance and zero acknowledgment from leadership, not even a canned email thanking people for their contributions. Employees who dedicated years to this company were discarded like expendable equipment. And adding insult to injury, after laying people off specifically to "cut costs," management forced terminated employees to personally drive their equipment back to the office rather than send prepaid shipping labels. Think about that for a moment: they fired loyal employees to save money, then made those same people waste their own gas and time to return company property because postage was apparently too expensive. Does that sound like a "Great Place to Work" to you?