Vantaggi
My intention here is to give honest feedback in the hope that leadership will genuinely reflect on their management style and how it affects the success of the business. Working from home is great as long as you clearly establish boundaries in terms of your working hours. HR recently listened to employee feedback re: benefits and put some effort into improving them. The newly hired fractional CTO recently convinced the CEO to fully refactor the app, which will hopefully alleviate some of the engineering/development problems I discuss below.
Svantaggi
All of Stynt's problems boil down to bad leadership. The culture is toxic, the company is highly reactive and lacks focus, compensation and benefits are lacking, and the app itself is a mess. Leadership places zero importance on building culture. The company has no stated values, only a mission statement. Turnover is high, trust in leadership is nonexistent, and there are few opportunities for remote employee bonding. The CEO displays a staggering lack of respect for his employees and micromanages to the point where it's hard to get anything done. He is rarely on time to meetings, schedules over existing meetings and expects you to rearrange your schedule to accommodate, and regularly criticizes individuals in a group setting. Nearly everything requires approval, even trivial process changes. The company is very reactive, and lacks focus and clear forward planning. Key metrics are changed weekly, and the results of new processes/efforts are judged immediately, before data can be collected on their actual impact. Meanwhile, the overabundance of dashboards and the unwieldiness of the database make it hard to find meaningful data. Stynt recently added some benefits (Talk Space app, continuing education through Udemy, employer-paid life and LTD insurance, 401k) but they could still use work. Compensation is below market across the board and raises are few and far between. Health insurance is expensive, and they only offer one (terrible) plan. They don't provide you with a work laptop, so you have to use your personal computer. For the first 7 years, the app was built by contractors on a project basis. They switched to a time-and-materials basis a year ago, but the project mentality still stands. Since, per the CEO's wishes, development has been almost exclusively feature-focused, tech debt has piled up to a level that the app can only be truly fixed by a complete refactor (which, to be fair, they have just started work on.) The CEO views tech debt as "engineering not doing it right the first time" and doesn't understand that it's due to features being developed as individual projects with a strict deadline/short timeline, resulting in a conglomeration of MVPs with no time allocated in the future to improve them. The relationship between Stynt and the engineering contractors is very combative and there's no trust, which makes it difficult to work effectively. Engineering's input is ignored, and their concerns aren't prioritized until critical services break. When they reported a major scalability issue, the problem was ignored for a full year thanks to the CEO's reluctance to spend money on what he viewed as "fixing engineering's mistakes" as opposed to "improving the product as it grows."