Pluspunten
I waited almost 6 months after the company laid me off so I could think through this review and offer it with as little bias as possible, so here is my best attempt *** Bipolar is categorized by "high highs" and "low lows," so I want to call out a few of the highs that I experienced before I disclose the lows that resulted in the final rating. (1) As a startup, they are extremely fast-paced and flexible in a number of ways. Changes to approaches or product features were a focus that often resulted in some innovative solutions and strategies and outside the box thinking. This company does not suffer from the "slow to act" mentality that plagues larger companies, and its ability to pivot is exceptional, though I will touch on the downsides of this in the next section. (2) As another high point, the people I worked with were some of the most passionate and empathetic people. Their values were "Be an owner," "Be you," "Be human," "Be creative & commit," and "Be transparent," and it's one of the few places where I felt the majority of employees strived hard to embody those traits. My final manager (I had 4 direct supervisors there—I will elaborate in the Cons) was great and gave a lot of trust and autonomy ("be an owner" and "be creative & commit"), recognizing my expertise in my role and his lack of experience in specific IT domains, and that trust allowed me to be really effective in finding ways to add value. (3) Finally, the general transparency of the people and their empathy towards me as the sole IT person in a company of 150 people were both truly remarkable characteristics of my time there. I was able to set boundaries in terms of work/life and also on what I could get to given my own capacity, and people respected these boundaries most of the time. The "flexible PTO" (nowhere is truly "unlimited" but it was as close as I've ever seen) was respected and encouraged with a 14-day annual minimum recommended, and I felt I was able to disengage when not working.
Minpunten
(1) Because of their flexibility and fast-paced mentality, this trended toward "toxic scrappiness" which I define as "cobbling together band-aid solutions for systemic health issues," i.e. the temporary workarounds became the final state more often than not. This is a result of having the startup mentality waxing extreme, and they prided themselves on "being scrappy" which works when you're a company under 50 and with limited resources but doesn't scale when you hit 100+ and need to mature as a company. Many processes remain immature and undocumented with leadership often skirting the established social protocols and unspoken cultural guardrails in order to achieve results. This isn't always bad, but in my experience this often meant the boundaries I tried to establish for "best practices" were tossed aside as inconvenient or unnecessary. I remained flexible and usually had "Best-case" / "Second-best" / "Worst-case" solutions because I knew the best-case scenario would go ignored by senior leadership. Again, "we're scrappy" taken to an extreme. (2) If the people across the company embodied the values (these are public on their website so I don't mind disclosing them here), the leadership did NOT consistently do so. I want to clarify the values and highlight ways they fell short as a leadership team: • BE YOU: "The unique qualities we bring to the team make us stronger together. We believe in balance, making time for fun, and enjoying the work we do." — Where they failed: several senior leaders were unapologetically dismissive of differing opinions and approaches. Again, "we're scrappy" became an excuse to do half-hearted solutions for larger issues rather than a guideline to be cost-conscious and flexible. The CEO was a former software engineer that built a lot of the product years ago, and I feel he never truly handed off engineering leadership to his head of engineering (this was across 3 different people in that role during my time there) and often micromanaged minor outages and incidents in the company chat tool • BE HUMAN: "We operate with compassion and always assume positive intent." — Where they failed: more than just my role, I saw how many of the engineering leaders were treated when they weren't able to deliver results on some aggressive timelines or had to de-prioritize some things in order to prioritize "the new thing" that leadership became obsessed with. I was treated this way occasionally, but often ignored and direction never came down the chain to me, even when I funneled information up the chain to get approval or review of my project proposals and change requests. • BE CREATIVE & COMMIT: "We collaborate, create resourceful solutions, and work as team to get it done." — Where they failed: The leadership people were creative and resourceful, but collaboration was lacking. Teams were not encouraged to collaborate except during the twice-a-year company offsites and when they tried to collaborate to find solutions they were often told it wasn't a priority. While I understand "do your day job," if all you're doing is putting out fires and not making yourself more fireproof you won't grow or succeed as an organization. Each organization group were often so busy they didn't have time to work as a larger team, especially with extremely lean teams (IT, data engineering, several product teams) it was often impossible to clean up technical debt because "the new thing" or the latest fire demanded our focus and attention exclusively. • BE TRANSPARENT: "We communicate openly, thrive on feedback, and check our egos at the door." — Where they failed: half the leadership team had extremely strong egos and micro-managed, not only their team but adjacent teams that they worked with. They also didn't communicate openly with many conversations happening suddenly and behind closed doors or as complete reversals of the publicly-stated decisions they made. Call it flexible, but this came across as indecisive and wishy-washy and when they were called on it during solicited feedback sessions they ignored the feedback and made excuses. The rest of the company was largely transparent and empathetic towards each other, but when the leadership didn't embody this it was only a matter of time before conflict arose—and conflict with leadership always favors the leadership. They were often not humble enough to admit when they were wrong, and the few times they admitted this they blamed it on execution rather than poor planning or lack of thoughtful decision-making on the front end. • BE AN OWNER: "We are all owners of this business. We take pride in our work and know that the success of our customers and the business contributes to our individual success." — Where they failed: while the rest of the company owned their decisions, mistakes, and successes, the leadership often downplayed their decisions and mistakes while exaggerating the successes. They encouraged you to take ownership but then when you made a decision they didn't like (while they also failed to provide feedback when you solicited it openly during multiple meetings and asynchronous group conversations) they would go behind your back or take away that autonomy and micro-manage that project or area of authority. They downplayed and silently terminated several key leaders who I perceived as adding value through their uniqueness (aka their "Be You" value), and they minimized several firings/terminations and later their layoffs as being "strategic business pivots" rather than mismanagement of resources or bad leadership decisions that led to challenging situations. They welcomed feedback, but when critical (not negative, but not affirming) feedback was provided they didn't "own" the feedback and take action on it.
