FINE Reviews

Toxic work culture, even more toxic leadership. No sense of personal boundaries. Your time is overly micro-managed and they expect longer than 40 hour work-weeks, and often times will try and get your weekends, too. Nepotism. So much nepotism. Constant moving goal posts for promotions and will sometimes be used as a bargaining chip to get you to erode more of what's left your personal boundaries. Favoritism. Really weird and consistent use of cultural appropriation. Leadership is insular and cliquey, and often responds to employees with with punitive and retaliatory action for personal–not professional–reasons. Unrealistic timelines and expectations set by leadership, which means you're destined to fail and will receive all the blame for it.

There is a dearth of people-management skills at FINE, and many of the senior people are super busy and disinterested in offering guidance or explaining what is going on to entry and midlevel employees. The positivity at FINE can often cross the line into toxic positivity. Everyone seems so happy go lucky at meetings but when I reached out one-on-one with other midlevel employees, it revealed underlying stress. Lack of transparency and effective people-management is making it a challenge for employees to successfully contribute their best work. Many are afraid to say when they are confused or flailing because everyone talks about nothing but how great everything is. It doesn't help that a lot of roles are pretty siloed, making people isolated. At one point, a high-level person at the company told me that several people who were let go in the previous six months were promised training and didn't get it. FINE brought them on with no development plan and no one had time to actually guide them. Therefore, all these employees were set up for failure and were inevitably let go after treading water for 3-9 months. The time two women of color were laid off at the same time was especially troublesome. Though I didn't have close insight into what happened it really bothered me. Some teams are better in this regard than others — the traction team is especially guilty. I'm sorry, but letting go about half of your new hires in less than a year is a huge red flag of a dysfunctional team without a clear plan or vision. It's just wrong to blame the employees you let go for that. It's also worth noting that payroll/benefits management seems to be bungled on a regular basis, at least in my experience.