Serious problems and autocratic leadership - Engineer Beamery Employee Review

Beamery's founders maintain a very tight grip on how the company operates. The smallest decisions are frequently overridden by executives, leaving little room for more junior (i.e. below VP) staff to have a say in the decision making process. Feedback is often sought from employees, but this often feels like a token gesture rather than leadership genuinely seeking input. I've attended many meetings where people have presented detailed technical plans for a project, only to be interrupted by a cofounder who instructs them to do something entirely different with no justification. Operating like this means that employees don't feel trusted to make good decisions, with leadership treating them as little more than code monkeys. The company is also at the mercy of its customers due to its sales strategy. By promising to develop whatever feature a prospect wants, a huge amount of development work is created with every big sale, and engineering teams are constantly forced to derail their own plans to placate a new customer, often with very little notice or clarity of requirements. The company's efforts for diversity and equality are quite superficial. The board and cofounders are entirely male, and we scored very low on a recent diversity and equality survey. Transparency at the company remains poor. A review/promotion period was promised for November last year, after the August period was cancelled due to Covid. This November period didn't happen either, without even a single sentence of explanation from the People team or leadership. It was as if they were hoping their employees would all forget that it was promised at all. The company claims to be working on their transparency, but when they constantly get the basic stuff so wrong, it doesn't matter what else they do. Staff turnover is alarmingly high, at around 40%. That should really tell you all you need to know about Beamery.