Clio

• Smart people on your team to learn from.
• 4 weeks vacation.
• Remote work is now permitted (finally).
• If you get the right manager, you can have a great experience.

They push everything down to your manager: raises, promotions, opportunities (aka cool projects), and feedback. If your manager sucks (and many of them do), your only option is to quit.

They keep changing what they want to see in order to be promoted, but a few teams tend to get a majority of them (because their work aligns best with the criteria and they have a good manager).

They like "yes" men. This means a lot of the projects you work on won't make any sense and won't make our customers happy, but people know how to get ahead and so just push the terrible ideas their managers give them (because their managers control their ability to make more money).

The company, especially when Rian was around, really wanted to see its employees succeed. The last 6 months to 1 year, this all fell apart dramatically. It's become an "us vs them" mentality. The business and especially upper management/the CEO now seem to see their lower-level employees as peasants who should be thankful for the gift of getting to work there. They shoot down all suggestions to make life better for their employees on their anonymous forum (Speak Up) and stopped asking for questions through an anonymous AMA tool after repeatedly responding negatively. They pretend they want feedback, but they only want positive feedback (and they literally say this in meetings: they ask people who like working there to leave reviews and those who don't to "talk to their manager").

They fought remote work for a long time. They were desperate to discourage it and repeatedly acted like those who worked from home were lazy. Then COVID happened and suddenly the CEO is crying about how well the company did with the transition and how it will be permanent. If only you had trusted your employees and not seen them as out to get you.

Take a deep breath, take a step back, and consider the company you claim you want to be. Amazon gets away with this because they pay insanely well. If Clio isn't willing to up their salaries, then they need to stop driving towards being such a terrible place to work.

Stop placing all employee development on the manager. You have a big percentage of managers who couldn't care less about their subordinates, and those who report to them are too scared to report it, as you have built a culture where feedback gets punished. I've seen it firsthand where trying to have a discussion about my manager got me labelled as a "cancer" on the team and became a blocker to any raises until it became clear quitting was my only option.

Jack, you say you read these, please, please look at your employees as equals. Don't throw down their anonymous ideas, don't see them talking about salaries and immediately assume they need to be grateful. If the same issue comes up time and time again, that's because it's a rampant problem. Instead of seeing your employees as the problem or trying to get understanding from those at the top, try to open a discussion loop with lower-level staff.