F5

I almost didn't write this for fear of retaliation. The soul of the company and the pros that we had were mostly removed in the past few years.

Recent pros include wellness weekends and a few extra PTO days.

Employee engagement programs were all but shut down.

People who worked across departments were all let go.

Internal promotions were almost non-existent.

External hiring added management at all levels who would show up, announce a major change to boost their name, and then leave.

Compensation did not even try to keep up with the market. Two years with no raises due to pandemic uncertainty, followed by a "raise" and a cut in RSUs that landed in a wash, despite huge cost of living increases at the same time. RTO demands, while over three-quarters of employees did not see value in returning.

Distributed teams were not properly managed by inflexible managers.

Unreasonable hours and regular weekend work because no one felt they could actually log off for a break.

I was here for over 5 years, and there was only 1 year we did not have either a major re-org or large layoffs.

Layoffs often selected employees who were not redundant, forcing others to pick up the slack and learn new skills rapidly. This resulted, of course, in spreading resources too thin, diminishing meeting SLAs on both systems, and then the employees picking up the slack being judged for not meeting what multiple people were doing before.

After years of this, the weight of 5 or more resources was being carried by individual, burnt-out people who had no hope for improvement or any chance at success.

The company has not been releasing products internally; instead, it has been acquiring other companies to bolster their product lines temporarily, while showing no faith in existing engineering teams.

Senior leadership would not support the suggestions that were needed to resolve issues, especially with acquired companies.

D&I was a meaningful program focused on policy, benefits, and was supposed to offer a path to leadership skills and promotions. Now, it is just words. The real programs no longer offer hope to employees and are used for marketing to investors and colleges.

It is time to change senior leadership, not the structure of the company at the bottom.

Promote from within. Resolve compensation discrepancies. Go back to celebrating remote work like you were one year ago. Stop cutting off the hands that feed the company. Bring back real employee engagement. Listen to your lowest-level employees.

Your drive to satisfy the shareholders has come at the cost of everything good in this company. Stock price is not the real value. The C-level execs pulling out more money from stock grants in one quarter than most employees will see if they work here 20 years shows that there is no concern for those actually doing the work. These concerns are not new and have come up in quarterly surveys for years.