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I have been working here for 6 months.

In general, they invest in a good technical stack and tools. We are having some interesting and challenging problems.

They offer a good salary, but not great, due to the stressful job and workload.

You work with some good engineers. The office is nice and has free lunch.

CKO has a very toxic working environment. My mental health was worse at CKO, and it took me one month to recover. The salary is not very good for your stressful job at CKO. You have long working hours; officially from 9 am to 6 pm, but you are expected to work longer than that. There is no work-life balance at all in CKO.

The worst thing is the line manager; they are very micromanaging. They are not honest and very political. They are not there to help you; they are there to criticize you and will give you some impossible missions if they don't like you.

There are no constructive feedbacks at all from my line manager; all feedbacks were negative. My line manager even refused to mention some good feedbacks from other teams. In particular, they just tried their best to find your faults and mistakes, even when I had worked hard and delivered my tasks in a good and positive manner (I can say my work was better than other senior devs).

There was no good onboarding process at all. You joined, you worked hard, and you got negative feedbacks as well as horrible mental health.

They said that they applied a hybrid working scheme, but there is no flexibility at all; you are expected to come back to the office two fixed days a week. I don't see any career opportunities here.

I will definitely and strongly not recommend my friends to join CKO, especially if you have kids, as they will not understand. Especially considering they just sacked 100 people a few months ago.

CKO is my worst working experience I have ever had. But thank you for helping me recognize what is important in my life.

You should not play politics or apply micromanagement to your staff. You should care about the people and help/support them instead of monitoring them all the time to find mistakes and blame/criticize them for their errors. What do you expect from a new engineer who has just joined for 1-3 months, with many things to learn? What you should do is look at their potential and positive attitude, and you should invest in people as your most important asset.