Falkor Reviews

The company’s decline in engineering culture can largely be traced to leadership choices in key technical positions, particularly at the architectural leadership level originating from head office. Over time, this role has expanded to encompass multiple critical responsibilities across architecture, core platform ownership, and major product direction. However, this consolidation of influence has not been matched by the technical depth, execution capability, or collaborative leadership required to effectively manage such a broad scope. Rather than driving a strong architectural vision and long-term engineering excellence, the focus has increasingly shifted toward high-visibility initiatives, self-promotion, and polished presentations with limited substantive technical impact. Core solutions are primarily built by engineering teams and external contributors, often with minimal technical direction from architectural leadership, yet the outcomes are frequently presented as leadership-level achievements. This has created a “credit up, blame down” culture that has eroded trust, morale, and engagement across engineering. Although these issues are widely understood internally, centralized leadership appointments and strong narrative control have made meaningful corrective action difficult.

This company consistently presents itself as a technology firm without operating like one. The software is poorly designed and poorly implemented, with architecture that feels accidental rather than intentional. Core engineering practices such as testing, performance discipline, maintainability, and rigorous code review are inconsistently applied or deprioritized. Leadership significantly amplifies these problems. Technical Directors and senior technical leaders often lack fundamental software engineering understanding, yet make high-impact decisions with confidence and little accountability. Engineer feedback is ignored unless it supports a predetermined narrative. The organization prioritizes perception over substance. Much of the emphasis on customers and adoption centers on forced proofs-of-concept designed to create the appearance of traction rather than evidence of stable, production-ready products. The gap between what is demonstrated and what actually exists is persistent and well known internally. Morale suffers as a result. Capable engineers disengage or leave, while those who remain learn that honesty is discouraged and optimism is expected. Problems are rebranded instead of solved, deadlines are committed without understanding the work, and repeated failures are normalized and reframed as progress.