- It often seems the CEO has not learned from missteps and the trials of the past year. Leadership acknowledged concerns only after public fallout and hasn't applied the learnings more broadly. The exec team is out of touch.
- This depends on the team, but onboarding is extremely difficult and disorganized. Prepare for a steep, frustrating, and self-directed learning curve with limited guidance. You will feel that nobody is making time for you.
- Lack of (competitive) benefits. At Everlane, you'll be expected to do a lot more than at similar companies — often by yourself in little time and with limited resources. It's not uncommon to work 9–7pm and then log back on at night.
- Poor work-life balance. You will work harder to do things that should have been automated by enterprise systems years ago. These financial investments are starting to be prioritized but there is still a ton of opportunity here.
- Parental leave policies are cumbersome.
- No 401k match, despite long-standing and demonstrated employee interest. You'll be asked to sacrifice your financial best interest in order to build a future for the company.
- Equity is marginal and has little actual value — a vanity benefit to persuade new hires into joining a "startup." The options offering is paltry, there aren't annual refreshers, and there is no realistic path to converting options to cash.
- No wellness stipend.
- No bonus below director level.
- Quarterly goal process is self-guided and decoupled from performance and compensation. You will create goals, request peer reviews, and then never revisit them.
- Despite recent leveling work to ensure salary compensation is equitable across cohorts and the slice of the market HR has decided they want to target, there is no pay transparency. It is not possible to know how compensation compares to a role's salary band, what the salary band for the next level is, or how you can get promoted. Ambiguity reigns and you have very limited control over your career trajectory.
- Despite a clear need for more resources (headcount has stagnated due to the revolving door of exits over the past two years), hiring has not caught up with growth. It is difficult to be truly promoted if headcount doesn't grow.
- Candidates are led to believe they'll be able to flex their entrepreneurial spirits. While day to day work is autonomous, it's only because leaders are also swamped and don't have time to spend with their teams. You will create scenarios and rework your work only to implement your original proposal or have a random one selected by your leader. At times, this false premise of empowerment can make doing the laborious, strategic work feel fruitless.
- The org claims to be flat. However, not all decision makers prioritize data or operate from a place of logic. This is something of an open secret internally and only applies to select teams. As the company becomes more tops-down (this has its pros), some decisions are made based on confirmation bias, anecdotal examples that are not representative of past/future reality, or on logic that is contradictory to previously-stated priorities. It is difficult to thrive in this type of ambiguity, so many people stop trying to and instead protect their bandwidth and sanity.
- Decisions are reversed and priorities change constantly. You'll be told this is part of working at a startup (and to an extent, it is), but it's often used to normalize how often it happens.
- The company is top-heavy and you'll feel it.
- Competent leaders (they exist and bring a powerful combo of experience, acuity, acumen, and empathy) are tasked with strategy, execution, and people management. The latter is the lowest priority in even the best cases.
- Since teams are chronically under-staffed, each employee is responsible for an entire area of the business. Mass departures every 6–12 months disrupt continuity and delay planned work to implement thoughtful business improvements. Your scope will shift as people leave and you inherit other areas of responsibility.
- Different teams always have competing priorities. At Everlane, some act unilaterally without seeking cross-functional alignment. Leaders who have created this culture are not discouraged.
- Leadership prioritizes optimism and false positivity over pragmatism and acknowledging reality. Any attempt to do so and you'll be derided for not being a team player or not focusing on what can change. Leadership speaks of progress as gradual, which serves to invalidate the reality as "getting better."
- One leader in particular has a documented history of questionable people practices and continues to be put in more and more visible positions of power.
- HR is a new function, so there are few processes in place.
