- For a company with a stated value of disruption, Homie does very little to challenge or operate differently than the traditional real estate model.
- Product and Technology go painfully slow to develop and deploy new features. Project timelines extend far beyond estimations. Technology is not seen internally as a meaningful differentiator despite lofty goals to be a tech company.
- A culture of toxic positivity is pervasive. Constant cheerleading and myopic simping for the company and it’s leaders. Even during the layoffs, the focus was on how hard it must be the the executive leadership team.
- Conflict averse. Asking questions on new initiatives or challenging stakeholder feature ideas earns you a reputation of having an attitude problem.
- Weird Mormon undertones in internal communication. A focus on being full of “light” and a fixation with saving money for “real families” on buying their homes.
- Women were systematically underpaid early on in the company. Zero women in the engineering organization. A leader once said in a meeting “if women want to be paid more, maybe they should learn how to code better”. Sexual comments made about women co-workers by leadership.
- An obsession of creating “good culture” while ignoring business realities. Very little pressure applied to IC’s even when performance was abysmal. Severe bugs on the website or app went ignored if they happened on weekends or holidays. When pressure was applied by middle management, they were demonized by upper management as ruining the “culture”.
- Lack of cohesive strategy. Very little roadmapping. Company OKR’s for the quarter come out weeks after the quarter starts. Copying competitors without understanding implications. Pivoting approach month to month. Very little documentation about decisions or rationale and reliance on conversations. Constantly rejecting standard processes as overkill. Pitting departments against each other, and duplicating work across departments.
