ResearchGate truly has the potential to do something impactful, if only egos might have a lesser influence over thoughts and decisions. It has been increasingly unclear where the company wishes to go – the dramatic shifts in focuses every quarter, imprecise and contextless metrics and performance indicators, products worked on halfway and dropped, all seem to reflect a lack of good planning, an insensitivity to the scientist that they serve, and an amateur understanding of which issues truly plague the community as a whole. It is entirely possible they've all been out of the field for too long, incubating visionary ideas to a point of mismatch with the real world.
There is concurrently a serious problem with internal communication and transparency, and unfortunately its solution is unlikely to be as simple as presenting product strategy to smaller groups every few weeks. The issue with ResearchGate's communication is not primarily a problem with how and how often. It's that it fails to see why and what – that they don't understand their employees, nor see that their engineers and other lower level employees have become disinterested in the work they do, that the hours they work are now out of obligation, no longer of passion. Management does not realize that culture does not come from words and declarations of what they say the culture is or should be, but rather what develops as a result of its treatment of employees and its actions, both seen and unseen. Management runs the company in the same manner they did in the very beginning, finding counsel in the echo chamber of the close-knit group of people that have been there from the beginning. They have not internalized that their company is now much larger than this faction, and that they now have a duty to solicit these woes and address them in meaningful ways.
For a brief time there was talk of establishing a worker's council. An entity which happens to be legally obligated for a company of this size. Unfortunately, it was instigated by an incapable and combative person that did not understand the true role and value of the council. However, ResearchGate, a company that claims to want to do good and right by their employees, chose to act surreptitiously at mention of this term, and viewed it as a threat. They did not recognize it as a sign of their own detachment to internal issues, and they did not welcome it as a route for employees to voice their concerns. Instead they chose to suppress it, and lost a chance for what could have been a productive joint process toward improvement.
I do not want to believe that there is genuine ill will in those that have authority and influencing opinion at the company, but I do believe that ego, combined with ignorance, willful or otherwise, and a constant game of equivocation has created an atmosphere of toxicity that continues to harm many good people that still work there.
I know that ResearchGate patrols these reviews, so I sincerely hope that this is read without brushing it aside as a statement by a disgruntled former employee. In truth, I don't harbor any bitterness – only disappointment in what I see as wasted potential.
