Very early on, Spektrix underestimated the amount of work it would take to make inroads in North America, leading to broken promises and longstanding disgruntlement among early adopters. The company has now overcorrected and communicates nearly nothing to clients about product strategy or roadmap.
With that said, things were clipping along more or less fine until the beginning of 2020. The pandemic was a challenge for most companies, and Spektrix was particularly exposed to risk due to servicing a sector that became almost entirely non-operational during the pandemic. The company survived the pandemic; the things that made it such a special place to work did not. A few examples:
- Senior management failed to develop any cohesive strategy to support its employees while working from home at any point during the pandemic.
- Almost all product development came to a complete standstill, putting an already behind-track roadmap even more so.
- Diversity and inclusion only became a concern for management after George Floyd's murder. Efforts to diversify the company have ranged from ineffectively tone-deaf at best to actively offensive at worst.
- Feedback became a weapon for managers. Expressing concerns that don't align with the consensus of senior management can, and will, result in retaliatory action. Due in part to seemingly non-existent HR, management is free to exercise judgment however they see fit, even if it's not actually what's best for the company.
More broadly, senior management takes a deeply bureaucratic, apparently feckless approach to any and all decision-making. Because everything needs to go through them, getting anything to move at any level of the business is a challenge. Getting concrete financial or logistical resource to make things happen was already challenging before the pandemic; now, it's basically impossible.
Compared to small nonprofit theatres in New York, where many hires have historically come from, Spektrix's pay and benefit package is reasonably fair. Compared to the industry it purportedly competes in--bundled Software as a Service--the compensation is laughable. Rather than being up front about this, the company repeatedly claims that benchmarks have indicated that the compensation offering is competitive. (What benchmarks, you may ask? Good question; nobody has ever seen them!) This kind of completely unnecessary spin is commonplace at Spektrix.
All of these factors combined have led to an extreme exodus of long-standing employees at all levels of the business - some by choice, some not. As the company hemorrhages employees and institutional knowledge, the live entertainment industry that the company services continues ramping back up, leaving the remaining staff even further under-resourced and overworked. Morale is at an all-time low and mental breakdowns are common; everyone seems to be eyeing the exits.
It's a shame, because for a long time I believed in what Spektrix was trying to do and how we were trying to do it. But everyone has a breaking point, and this seems to be the year that broke everyone.
It didn't have to be this way.
