Ripple

It's unclear why over 25% of the company has left now, and sees no sign of slowing down. Engineers, managers, product folks, VPs are all leaving in droves. Why on earth is this!? There are so many good things about the engineering department here:

• Aging tech stack that middle-management is hell-bent on keeping relevant because it keeps them relevant.
• Appear to be working for one of the best companies in FinTech and SF due to constant gaslighting from management gently coercing employees to fill out positive engagement surveys.
• Increase your communication skills by working with departments hiding mediocrity inside of heavy and unnecessary processes.
• Feel good about yourself for participating in faux diversity and inclusion efforts, and then watch as HR executes witch hunts against other departments for fake violations of diversity and inclusion.
• Work-life balance realized by constant Zoom meetings, late-night and weekend work requirements to hit deadlines, and release after failed release after failed release.

Politics here like you've never seen. Consider that if Ripple is successful, they'll be one of the most powerful companies on Earth. Greed rules here, and managers at all levels will be the first to throw peers and staff under the bus so fast to save their own jobs or butts. Engineers at all levels that are able to play politics and tow the company line derail entire initiatives because they happen to know better for one reason or another over senior engineers. It's a mess because there is no rudder, and all teams are spinning in weird circles trying to either keep their heads down or play political games.

Engineers have little autonomy. Engineers that have been around for many years ignore the processes that newer managers have put up, so they're able to get work done. Otherwise, management constantly tells employees what to work on and when to have it delivered.

Innovation is actively squashed by middle management. Managers that are fearful of new innovations being spawned by the company to help with faster delivery are killed by institutional teams for fear of losing their own jobs. Prisma was created because ODL was unable to deliver quickly and safely. Yet, Prisma got constant pushback because they worked in a different way. No matter that they released many times a week safely and were able to create an entirely new platform – it's a threat to other managers and is fought tooth and nail.

Snakes in leadership at all levels will lie to you directly to your face and then go do other things behind closed doors. There's no other way to explain it. Be careful what you say and who you say it to, or else HR will come and find you.

You care about optics. Yet, if you look at the data coming from this platform and Blind, there are a lot of folks leaving and telling you how it is. The data is here, and it doesn't look good. Don't ignore it.

Get rid of the value "Say the Thing" or repair the trust that has been lost. It's no longer a value for you to hold up. People that said the thing have been let go under the most sketchy manners.

• Employees fired because they were at the company longer than 3 years (stale) to make room for new employees with new ideas (shiny).
• Employees that leave because they were fed up are then justified to have been ignored and thrown under the bus once they leave.
• Leadership fired without a plan for moving forward and hid in a shroud of secrecy. (Hint: there is no privacy at Ripple Engineering. Gossip here like in primary school is prevalent, everyone knows everyone's business.)
• Departments torn apart in ways that would make your grandmother blush by an activist HR department.

The loss of the Engineering SVP more than several months ago and the massive amount of time between filling the spot with the new SVP left a huge power vacuum where middle management at all levels fought to make themselves relevant and important. Yet, you've had release failures, long delays in feature development, and pushback on the most basic of requests. Why is this? Why is it that the Iceland team is leaving? They were supposed to help with this? Maybe they got tired of fighting management in the US that were constantly hesitant to adopt new technology and process? Who knows?

You're also losing your best folks. It's because they're tired of fighting this machine that has been created. The company is well setup for success if it were a 5000+ person enterprise. However, it's a 500 person company, and a 100+ person engineering department. Engineers at this company want to be successful, but management has made it near impossible to do anything outside of the beaten path, but then they blatantly ignore direction coming up from above. Ask yourself why you've been trying to move to "Cloud First", and there is so much pushback from Engineering on the On-Premise experience.

You need to also get rid of the HR professionals that have ruined the relationship with the engineering department. Do you want honest feedback from that organization ever again? You'll either need to fire all the engineers or fire the HR professionals. This is super important to do, because the HR department won't be trusted again until they are. Whether you like this fact or not does not make it less true. There are two of them, you know who they are, and every day they stay makes it impossible to repair the rift that they created. Don't double down - fix it. Word will get around about the culture that exists, and you're going to be only able to hire new graduates because anyone in the industry is going to avoid this company like the plague.

Best of luck executing on the vision of the company. I believe you'll be successful, but unless some drastic changes are made, you're going to fight yourself internally just as much as you're fighting the existing banks and institutions in the rest of the world. It does you no good if the team executing on this grand vision are led by bad management.