Thumbtack

Thumbtack faces interesting challenges as a marketplace with the goal of providing immediate feedback to users. The company is at a scale where there are serious problems to tackle on the product, BI, and technical sides of the company.

Leadership is poor and has a high turnover rate. Management does not care for their reports and ICs are left to fend for themselves. Decisions are made based on who speaks the loudest, defaulting to whoever has the highest level. ICs have little input in what they work on and sometimes boil down to little more than highly-paid contractors instead of software engineers. This leads to an overall culture where engineering holds the product hostage and blocks (purposefully or otherwise) the implementation of new features.

It's too late, but perhaps in your future work you can manage your ICs instead of guessing at what actions might make C-level execs happy.