Many of the below issues are concealed under the pretense of being a “startup or fast-paced environment” - while in reality, it’s chaotic and unstructured, lacking the focus and adaptability of a truly agile organization.
- Lack of real leadership and trust
Leadership presence is weak, disengaged, or disingenuous. Employees report a culture of posturing rather than authentic collaboration, integrity, or mutual trust. Some tech leads (mine for sure) and people managers literally are lying as normal behavior and for personal benefits for the costs of company and team benefits.
- Lack of organizational structure and mid-level tech management
Core roles and responsibilities are undefined or entirely absent. Titles such as team leads, architects, QA engineers, and analysts are fully missing.
- Toxic culture
Despite the initial signals and expectations for a good culture, from the very beginning a gossips and mockery is noticeable - about colleagues, company behavior among the “team members” and “tech leads / directors of engineering”. While some employees are clearly overloaded, others appear disengaged, prioritizing banter over meaningful work. Honest and/or valuable feedback is rare due to fear of retaliation or political consequences.
Team-building events further reflect the unhealthy culture-participation is pressured rather than voluntary. Employees are told they must either attend or work that day. Those who sign up but later cannot attend are warned they’ll have to personally cover hotel and transport costs. This reinforces a culture of control rather than genuine team cohesion.
- Poor hiring and people management
The approach is driven by a hire-and-fire mentality. From day one, communication is lacking. Employee branding, employee Net Promoter Scores, average retention (~1y) in some tech teams are notably low.
- Absurd and dysfunctional onboarding process
The onboarding experience is chaotic, poorly structured, and completely detached from reality-regardless of your position, even as a junior. The so-called onboarding "process" consists of a massive checklist spanning over a month, containing hundreds of items that are often disorganized, redundant, or irrelevant. Many refer to outdated systems and procedures that have been deprecated years ago without any replacements.
No matter the expectation to deliver production-level features and bug fixes immediately - despite vague requirements and inconsistent, often absurd code reviews - I believe the more serious issue lies in the unclear 'checkbox' processes and the overwhelming amount of mutually exclusive or misleading information. Valuable time is wasted just trying to reconcile contradictions. What’s more troubling is that this is a well-known issue across teams and management - and precisely because it’s known, it can be (and sometimes is) exploited in internal politics.
Meanwhile, critical onboarding support is absent: product training is only available upon persistent requests (eventually), and feedback surveys refer to onboarding steps you’ve never even heard of. You're assigned an “onboarding buddy” who may be just a few months into the company, already overwhelmed and missing half of the time. Despite all this, you can still be labeled a “low performer” or “bad example for the team” - not due to actual output or conduct, but simply because you're unable to keep up with this disjointed, unrealistic onboarding chaos.
