C3.ai

Some interesting technical problems to solve.

Rewards for learning, including the UIUC master's program and an incentive program for taking Coursera classes (although this has been cut back since the beginning of the COVID pandemic).

Nice RWC office campus (location, gym, etc.).

Overall, a strong culture of fear. The culture and company practices promote individual, rather than team, achievement, motivating selfish choices and combative relationships between coworkers. Public shaming is common practice, and team leadership turns a blind eye to disrespectful behavior between colleagues.

Some specific points:

• The CEO micromanages everything from office lunch menus to required daily status reports on every team throughout COVID WFH. Employees must conform to his priorities and opinions or face retribution.

• The CEO is also disrespectful towards other companies and other people in both public interviews and internal discussions, including when those other people are employees of his company. Productivity is valued over employee wellbeing; employees are treated as disposable.

• Work/life balance is explicitly discouraged, and the CEO has even said in company all hands that he doesn't want to hire employees who care about work/life balance. If that wasn't enough, he went on to say (as illustrative examples) that he doesn't want to recruit people who are too focused on being parents or being involved in their church communities.

• The bottom ~5-10% of performers on a given team (determined by subjective manager feedback and some vaguely defined code output metrics) are fired every performance cycle.

• No regular raises or promotion process.

• No 401k matching.

Regarding COVID response:

• WFH started being allowed later than most tech companies, and by the beginning of June, employees were told to be back in the office starting in mid-June with in-person work mandatory by the beginning of July. When that plan was unfeasible because of local mandates, the timetable was pushed back 2 weeks at a time, with very little lead time for each pushback. Leadership even went so far as to argue that the (entirely software-based) company was an essential business so that we might go back into the office before the general population was doing so.

• Some people have been working in the office since mid-June; temperature checks are not enforced, masks are not generally worn, and the back-to-back rows of desks have not been reconfigured to support social distancing.

• While working from home, every employee is required to give daily status updates to be shuffled up the reporting chain to the CEO. To me, this process communicated a lack of trust and created a feeling of being surveilled for the slightest lack of productivity.

Be open to honest and anonymous feedback internally, and work on creating a supportive environment. Lots of productivity is lost right now to attrition and infighting.