Can't seem to shake overwork/burnout culture in R&D dept. Team members brought up their overwork at almost every all hands meeting. Management tried to remedy it with "free days off" but not to much success when people still had to work on these days. Difficult to work with contract manufacturer.
New CEO leaves a bad taste in the mouth. He belittled the work of the software engineers in our first R&D all-hands. Let us know immediately when introducing himself to the company that doing something wrong was the quickest way to get fired working for him. Is seemingly obsessed with Elon Musk and SpaceX and Amazon and using their principles at Evolv, an immediate red flag for me. Following suit with trending RTO mandates and requiring people 75 miles away to drive 3 hours in traffic one way to come to work 3 days a week when their job was done just fine at home. Because he flies in from Chicago every week on the company dime to be in the office for 3 days. Aimed to reduce discretionary spend to reach profitability and claimed they weren't going to touch "people spend" aka payroll. Proceeded to lay off 40 of us a few weeks later. In a way I am glad he laid me off. I think I would have hated working for him and been on my way out as soon as I could.
