Pros
* Some great people, though belittled and verbally abused by the CEO * Meeting some of the biggest names in Venture Capital (from a distance, interacting with them too closely was forbidden)
Kontras
* Cursing: the CEO easily embarrassed and shamed even the most hardened individuals. * Ineffective communication: when over half the words in most sentences are all from the root f-word, the percentage of meaningful words drops * Awful hiring decisions with no input. The CEO, after firing her co-founder and CTO, brings in an unqualified person as CTO with no input from her technical experts who have combined decades of experience in Amazon alone. * CEO attempts to direct detailed design concepts in distributed systems despite disinterest to learn the basics. * Arbitrary deadlines. New, incompetent CTO makes promises to CEO without input from the engineering team, based on “designs” that he will not divulge to anyone. * Engineers, who had been working in a highly collaborative, mutually supportive environment, are suddenly faced with having to do a full re-implementation they had no input on. * Captive external company JSL received plum assignments from mutual employee, a clear conflict of interest to which the CEO turned a blind eye. * Customer Success leader is summarily fired despite long term friendship with CEO. CS team departs. * Engineers leave or are fired. Backfills are far less capable, though cheaper, thus CEO sees only upside. * CRO and CEO battle often. Eventually, with almost no sales and certainly no path to cash flow positive much less profit, the CRO quits/is fired * Sales team totally turns over, no surprise, no sales, no commissions, no retained people. * CEO eventually realizes just how incompetent the replacement CTO is, fires him. * Most senior engineer remaining is begged to stay so someone knows how things are built * Net result: Only the CEO is left in 2020 of anyone who was there before late 2017 / early 2018. That’s five years of the company’s timeline with no context remaining. * Two questions remain: 1) if you were an investor would you bet your funds on Usermind? And 2) if you’re an engineer with a range of possible places to work, would you choose this meat grinder of a company? * Other than the above, it’s a fine place to work.