Pros
Working here used to be awesome. Leadership was competent and valued their employees. The coworkers and people were great. Employees worked hard and the work was challenging, but people knew their contributions were appreciated. There used to be perks like good health insurance at low expense to the employee and the option to work fully remote. There were so many upsides - dog friendly office, catered meals, free in-office table massages, team potlucks and volleyball. When the company met annual goals, everyone got to go on vacation and bring a +1. How incredible is that?! However, sadly those days are long gone.
Kontras
The company has been in decline ever since selling to Private Equity. Several of the smart and strategic leaders who knew the ins-and-outs of the business and worked with traders to drive business success were ousted or left voluntarily, and new ZMC-backed leadership wasn’t willing to learn or understand what had been driving the success, so they didn’t soak up any of the wisdom when the torch was passed. Despite the female CEO, this is very much an old boy’s club, where C-suite execs hire their friends/former colleagues and hand over senior roles to completely unqualified individuals, who all happen to be white men. The rampant sexism and pay disparity between men/women at this company is outrageous, discriminatory, and maybe illegal. Politics are out of control and everyone is just concerned with ‘looking good’ at all costs. Communication is poor and proper stakeholders are repeatedly excluded from important conversations. There is almost zero accountability at the senior level. Leadership is floundering because they didn’t take the time to understand their product or what made this company special, and they keep trying to force a “one size fits all” approach because that’s apparently what worked at the WSJ. Simpler is not the Wall Street Journal, nor are we Spotify. Several higher ups worked at “The Street” - which if you know anything about trading, you’ll know Jim Cramer is a crook and laughing stock. The failure to recognize this and prioritize our customer experience has lead to round after round of layoffs. There have been layoffs almost every quarter since Feb 2022 - meanwhile, leadership is spending money on flying everyone out to Austin and putting them in a fancy hotel for 3 days, wasting money on opening multiple new in-person offices (that they’re forcing employees to return to), and burning cash on contractors, agencies, and consultants who can’t bring nearly the level of support or quality of work that in-house teams were doing. They are completely reckless financially and prioritizing the wrong things, even continuing to hire for open positions, then laid off the new hire less than a month after starting. People left their existing jobs to take new positions at this company, and were then immediately let go through no fault of their own. It’s SO wrong and that should have never happened, but that’s how inept the planning, forecasting, and foresight is here. Additionally, after every round of layoffs, instead of reprioritizing work or considering the most important projects to turn things around, leadership just continues to demand more output with less resources. Almost everyone is overworked, tired, and burnt out. Employee morale is incredibly low, quality of work has suffered, and huge mistakes are being made left and right (but usually those are quietly swept under the rug and not called out, acknowledged, or learned from). Things are always in crisis mode and teams hustle to get things across the finish line, only to learn the direction has changed at the 11th hour and much of the work must be redone. Those types of organizational inefficiencies could be minimized with smarter planning. It’s been so sad to watch the culture and company fall apart. It’s hilarious that ZMC seems to believe the culture has taken a turn for the worse because everyone was working remotely, when in reality it took a turn for the worse because of the decisions they made on the C-suite level, immediately installing a couple of execs who were horrible culture fits or who never delivered results. Those leadership choices had a significant ripple effect across the entire organization, including driving off some very talented and beloved workers who were keeping the company afloat, to the point that I’m not sure the company can ever recover. If you’re thinking about working here, this is definitely the right company for you if (1) you want to get laid off (2) you want to be so overworked you have daily meltdowns (3) you want politics and crony hires to triumph good decision-making (4) you want leaders and coworkers who pretend to care about feedback but disregard anything they don’t want to hear (5) you want to watch all of the remaining good, smart, strategic, hard-working coworkers slowly jump ship one by one so that one day you will only be surrounded by the defensive, inept, or snakey ones (6) you want to be underpaid
