Handshake

The people you work with as peers are some of the most amazing, kind, hard-working people you will meet.

Compensation also isn't bad, especially when a leader likes you and hires you into a level you don't actually qualify for just to get you into a higher pay band.

The C-suite and Senior Leadership are terrible (except for Christine and Marta). Garrett and senior leaders initially placed all the blame for the company struggling these last couple years on on-the-ground workers and mid-level managers (as you'll see in reviews here, there have been many re-orgs, rounds of firings, layoffs and 'role eliminations') and realized too late that it was actually the leaders above those orgs that should have been the ones to take accountability and blame. Now that the pressure is on for senior leaders and above, now that their performance is finally under scrutiny, all any of them cares about is surviving for themselves because they know they can no longer pass the buck to the lower-level managers and their staff. This is creating even more chaos, toxic territorialism, lack of collaboration, and low morale.

There is a huge lack of direction, mission alignment, and priorities. This is reflective of the poor leadership and management HS is facing. After being shaken up and re-orged so many times, no one knows what the most important things are anymore, what anyone owns, who is accountable for what, and why we're doing what we're doing. This is further exacerbated by their glaringly ineffective and often conflicting communication to the rest of the company, where they constantly dance around topics (re-org comms, layoff/firing rationales, change in healthcare benefits, return to office, etc).

There is also a lack of clear career progression and opportunities. In order to move up in the company, especially to senior and staff positions, it often feels like a popularity contest and, once you've made it, you can effectively coast and get away with being a poor collaborator, communicator, and contributor. It feels like you have to jump through so many impossible hoops just to make it to a senior level, where actual seniors around you are doing way less than you are but still are making more money than you with the title. If you try to figure out why you aren't hitting the mark for promotion, you'll often get the runaround, and the goalposts are moved time and time again, leading to frustration and burnout.

And most egregiously, we don't live and reflect our own mission of democratizing opportunity. Our culture has slowly been degrading toward identifying with other more toxic big tech companies, instead of jumping on the opportunity of standing out as a company that not only is working outwardly towards its mission of democratizing opportunity but also living it. What few (if any) DEI initiatives we have fall directly and only on those that are from underrepresented communities (the tax is real), and this work is not rewarded. Our hiring of early talent/juniors is nonexistent. Yes, we have an intern program, but for full-time work, we've shifted, at least in engineering, to the mindset of 'senior is better,' so we only hire seniors when we could be opening up opportunities to early talent. There are rumors of return to office cropping up, which can be great for camaraderie and butts-in-seats micromanagement, but can possibly be less accessible to those who can't afford to live in expensive areas, who benefit from WFH due to childcare or a caretaker, that have a disability, and so on. There are many other ways where our internal culture is conflicting with what we try to portray outwardly, so if you do come join Handshake, you can experience the hypocrisy for yourself.

You always tell us to be owners and problem solvers, so take your own advice and figure out why you ruined things. Then, find solutions to make Handshake the amazing, successful company it was a couple years ago instead of this toxic big-tech-clone-wannabe company that it's turning into.