Quora

The firm provides top-notch benefits and great food.

The firm has executed some surprising hiring coups. Poaching a Stanford physics professor and the top competitive programmer is no easy feat.

Work-life balance is favorable. I've experimented with a lunch-to-dinner schedule without adverse results. The firm has liberal leave policies.

Great parties are hosted by the firm and coworkers.

Fewer meetings than before, and you can ditch the useless ones without much fuss.

The firm's name brand is considerable and attracts recruiters like honey.

The firm had a core of expert employees from founding through the middle of 2014. Since then, the firm has rapidly bled its most talented employees, and few coworkers know enough of what they're doing to be useful.

Now, there are but four people at Quora who I look forward to working with every day, and I'm not even a member of their product teams. Unfortunately, the good people are also cliquey, taking secret trips together and privately demeaning others.

The firm has historically focused recruiting efforts on college grads. Up to 2012, they were good. Recent classes have been categorically unremarkable aside from two or three gems. The rest are good for talking, politicking, name brand, and not much else.

And experienced hiring has been similarly plagued, discounting the two hiring coups. The firm has resorted to putting high schoolers in charge of things.

Title inflation is out of control. The firm has managers with no reports. Management invents new titles left and right: "architect" now means a manager who wants to play IC. The Staff title at Google comes with authority, personal responsibility, and an expectation of competence. It carries only the first of those at Quora.

Internal culture at the firm is oriented around back patting and saving face. Changes are routinely launched after negative or unconvincing experimental results. Experimental design itself is an afterthought, considering the default attitude of "collect 100 metrics and look for green!"

There are a handful of big personalities charged with decision-making power. Ergo, "want answers."

Compensation is compressed and below market. Compressed means there's scant incentive to be useful. Below market means below market.

Employee experience and expectations vary wildly with team placement. An employee placed on a low-quality team will learn and work on nothing of value.

Firm management holds no trust among employees and spends an inordinate amount of energy in reassuring employees without instituting genuine transparency. These efforts were cute for a while (lookie here! our employee survey results are above industry mean!), but became plain annoying.

A fresh example: firm management used the last few weeks to protractedly unveil "new company values," which are now the subject of frequent mockery in private chats.

Above all, monetization is being led by the wrong people. These cons would be tolerable if my stock options had a fair shot of amounting to anything.

This product does not need 150 people. Make the hard decisions.

Identify your top employees. Pay them market. Make them stay. Hire more like them. Charge them with making money. Institute zero-tolerance for anything less than piercing honesty. And then get out of the way.