- Time clocking is taken so seriously and done in such an overly engineered manner that you never feel like a salaried employee. If I was even an hour below 40 I would inevitably get questions about it or felt I had to justify when and how I would make it up. You never feel like a trusted adult who can manage their own time. And things, like taking a walk, or attending a lunch talk, or even eating lunch, are considered unclocked time. In other words, it is not enough to be AT work for 40 hours a week; you have to put IN 40 hours of active clocked work per week. It's not bad at first, but it eats away at your mental health quickly
- The leadership team has no strategic direction for the company. If that weren't bad enough, they constantly delegate decisions downwards. Significant, well-documented problems will sit forever with no movement -- sometimes I thought the leadership team assumed problems would simply go away with time. Sometimes they seemed to talk themselves into believing they were non-issues. Somtimes I became afraid they didn't have a clue what they were doing. No matter the root cause, it's not good.
-Everyone is spread too thin and across too many roles or projects. Burnout is rampant. Lack of movement on critical decisions is typical. This is especially true for non-developer positions; it is just assumed one person can fill multiple roles with ease and there is little to no support for building out the operations, business, hr sides of the company.
-At first look, Caktus has an incredibly transparent compensation system with very clear "completion items" for achieving promotions (positive!). But there are so many problems with the system that it quickly loses its shine:
-- compensation is based on cost of living, only the company hasn't updated the cost of living score since the system was put in place despite that score increasing significantly in the Triangle area.
-- managers do not live up to the promise of a transparent system of promotion. Over and over again--despite having completed the necessary growth, documented that growth, and excelled in my position--I had to fight for months (sometimes more than 2 quarters) in order to get promotions.
-Little to no career development. Despite the company organization being seemingly wide open for growth and advancement, somehow there is very little room for growth. Caktus may have great professional development, but almost no career development. Even when there are noted gaps where necessary roles or tasks could use someone to take ownership, one is constantly told they are not ready, they need more training, that's not their job, etc. There is a fear of delegation and letting go of tasks or projects and you have to fight tooth and nail to grow in your role even if you're a high performing employee with excellent reviews.
-Leadership consistently chooses processes over people, leading them to act in ways that can be interpreted as callous and lacking in empathy. It would help if they communicated better about these things, but noone on the leadership team is a particularly good communicator.
-The vacation package seems generous until you realize you have to take vacation time in order to take holidays. This means if you want to take the standard 10 days alotted for U.S. vacations, you're left with only 10 days of vacation.
-Leadership is stubborn and has done very little to change or improve despite years of consistent and well documented feedback of issues( regarding implicit sexism, lack of leadership and poorly trained management, lack of communication and direction in terms of company goals and strategy, lack of follow-through with promotions, refusal to listen to expertise or grant experts trust and the benefit of the doubt, and more). They've lost a host of people in the past year over these issues. I hope they are finally listening.
