MongoDB

Smart people, competitive compensation, bi-weekly retrospectives on processes and team work, quarterly onsites, and interesting projects. There are still some great people working here, but there are also those who ruin it for everyone else, as you'll see in the cons section.

While the company started out mostly great when I joined, many projects were not planned out correctly and resulted in gross underestimation, while churn relieved its original participants from any accountability.

This only becomes apparent over time, but by the time one realizes the predicament they are in, they are too heavily invested and overworked to crawl out of it.

Its famed culture started to decline soon after the arrival of several top-level executives from Amazon. Once tech layoffs became fashionable, management blissfully declared that no layoffs were planned, but instead "raised the bar" by vastly reducing the number of overperformers during each review cycle and enforced that 5% must be underperformers.

Indeed, the culture continued its rapid descent while the company took on more and more former Amazon executives.

To be fair, promotions were rampant, and many people who were not ready for their new roles were promoted too quickly to begin with. Perhaps this was seen as a way to combat the rapid rise, but did little to deal with people who were already in those roles. There were plenty of 'leaders' who were in no position to lead others.

These people remained in positions of power while themselves underperformed, and are now pressured to deliver or streamline their costs. This resulted in making demands on their teams that started to overstep reasonable expectations, pushing those team members into the "underperform" category and finally managing them out with a performance improvement plan, despite performing well in every other metric, resulting in termination without severance.

Culture, innovation, and work-life balance now take a backseat at this company, but I suspect this is only the beginning.

Listen to and be observant of your employees, whether or not they say they are being overworked. There may be something more systemic behind it.

Sacrificing your workforce to keep investors happy is a very short-sighted maneuver, one that will challenge even the most loyal employees.

If you must shrink the company, at least be transparent about it and provide people with the severance they so deserve.