Tala is disappointing and rife with people who, seemingly in a matter of days or weeks, are shocked to find a truly inept, scared and awkward senior leadership team.
Again, while your teammates may end up being some of the best people you'll meet, senior leadership tends to be defensive, insecure and divisive. Perhaps this is a function of some really great people deliberately remaining in an IC capacity after having attempted to become senior directors or above and being witness to the demoralizingly inept reality that Tala is run by people of average competence and intellect with below average temperaments, ingenuity and creativity.
It would seem quality people are brought in with some fanfare only to watch them leave just a short while later because expectations weren't managed well during their interviews. Or they were outright lied to. Frankly, if there were more honesty during the interview process (a hallmark of companies, even startups, trying to improve and address issues at the root cause level) you could mentally prepare for working at a seven–year old, largely inept startup who has relied on venture capital since the beginning as the default corporate social responsibility arm of companies like PayPal. Essentially, Tala is a line in some other company's CSR deck explaining that they're funding the change they want to see. At least before 2022's perceived economic downturn.
If any of us had been told honestly, "hey, it's going to feel like you're working at a last ditch effort to turn things around, to justify this last bit of money we've gotten," we would understand what we just left our jobs or other opportunities for and promptly roll up our shirt sleeves and get to work with the appropriate level of urgency. Instead...
A few symptoms of this ineptitude are some of the same dynamics you might expect to find at a dysfunctional, small to midsized, family run company:
-A prejudicial environment in which people of color, people new to the industry, seasoned professionals, people who didn't grow up in a white, middle-class family or above, tend to feel ostracized, and quietly or overtly pushed out.
-When you start to see all the grayed out profiles of people who've recently left within the last year, particularly among those based in the US, a pattern emerges, and that pattern looks like the inverse of the list I shared above.
-A pervasive contractor mentality: Look no further than to any one of the tens of weekly, interminable meetings you might find yourself in to understand what you're really meant to do here: Agree openly if not enthusiastically to the highest paid, non technical person in the call then suffer silently through a patchwork tech stack made up of short-sighted decisions people who long before made because they inherited the same from some other ostracized group of devs who have since quit in protest. Rinse and repeat.
-An icky, toxic positivity that feels more like a status update on a North Korean scrum team, including prop project/product managers who's smiles feel like they're coming under duress for fear of offending the supreme leader.
-A "mean girl" environment in which gossip is disseminated from senior leadership to let others know who is now outside the circle of trust.
Here are some questions you should ask during your interview:
-What is our attrition rate, particularly in engineering? Why? What's contributed to that rate of attrition? Ask follow up questions here maintaining the veneer of SoCal positivity that's expected of a future Talazen.
-What's our financial outlook, have we been profitable? Why or why not? What efforts have been made to turn things around or accelerate profitability, if any?
-Do we have a roadmap? What's informed this roadmap? (Here you should listen closely, there's a lot of intricate wordplay stolen from a social impact deck someone likely Googled that could be more easily explained by, "we've gotten bad press over the last few years, and to avoid that bad press, we're reactively working on products that no longer inadvertently export lifelong, high–interest rate debt slavery to developing countries all while building the capability to identify and segment users across four different markets with wildly different behaviors and needs on a tech stack that's more fragile than our newly minted CTO's ego".
-What huge initiatives have recently failed or succeeded and why? What were our learnings or takeaways? How will I be enabled to enact those changes (see previous response on attrition rate and compare answers)?
