Interesting but with lots of gotchas - Software Engineer Chartmetric Employee Review

I appreciate you taking time to write this review, so the future employees can benefit from your perspective. As a CEO, it breaks my heart that a former employee didn't have a great experience here. I am constantly working to make it a better place to work, but it takes time and effort I admit. I wanted to address some of the points in the review above, since things have changed since, and some of them stem from misunderstanding. 1. Culture of failure Yes, I say that we are not afraid of failures, but that doesn't mean that we have a 'culture of failure'. If we aim for successes only, innovations slow down and employees learn less, because there's less chance to take the risks. I encourage risk-taking, and sometimes even encourage failure, if it means that we learn more and make the product / company better as a result. Our data quality and security are definitely not a joke. We use Amazon Aurora, Snowflake, Elasticache to serve customers with best user experience, and use Terraform to improve the security / deployment, and use NewRelic to monitor our backend. We have invested so much on improving our data accuracy and quality, that now all three major labels - Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment, as well as Facebook and Netflix are heavily dependent on our data in running their businesses and making critical decisions. We are covering close to 8 million artists, and we ingest hundreds of millions of data points every data. We strive to become the most reliable source of data for the music industry, and that never changed in the last 7 years. It really hurts to hear that a former employee feels that our data quality was poor - all the data engineers are working really hard to make our customers happy, and they are happy. I felt stifled in my previous organization, when the culture was to avoid the failure at all cost. It really killed innovation and productivity, and more than anything else, not a fun place to work. When I started this company, the number one goal was to build a business while providing a great learning opportunity for everyone. It's not an easy place to work, but I can say that it provided great career progression when I see some previous summer interns got into great companies afterwards - Facebook, Spotify, Zillow, and promising startups. If you want to join a company where you can learn and get challenged, this is the right place. If work-life balance is more important, and you just need a paycheck to pay your bill, this is not the right place. It is also not true that the 'management' just wants to push new features out. While we are working on new features to meet our customers needs and compete against competitors, we work on lots of bug fixes / improvements / code refactoring. For example, we launched a new project last year to change our frontend codebase from Angular to React, and have invested more than a year on that. We are about to deploy this new version, and we are really excited about that! 2. Senior vs junior engineers I find a great joy when a brilliant junior engineer can learn so fast, and deliver the quality what some senior engineers can only do. I am happy to offer 'senior engineer compensation' to a 'junior engineer'. Yes, 'senior' means more experience, and we do need the experience to build things right, but it doesn't mean that senior engineers always do better jobs. We needed more balance indeed, and a VP engineering joined earlier this year, and the engineering organization is now a lot more stable under his leadership. 3. Work/life balance No work/life balance, calls on the weekend is really exaggerated. We are a B2B SaaS company. Naturally, not much happen during the weekday nights (especially for California time zone) or during the weekends. As a CEO, but also as a dad of 3 daughters, I truly appreciate that I have the right balance at work, and I hope this is the case for everyone here. Very rarely, things happen during the evening or the weekend, but it's a rare case. Again, if your no.1 goal is work/life balance, this is not the right place. 4. Transparency I guess this is about the product decisions. I still get involved a lot of product-related decisions, and since I know what the customers want, and what is the right way to implement it, I sometimes make decisions on my own. It's definitely not to hide something, but it's to increase the efficiency. Company revenue (MRR / ARR) is open for any employees to see, and we do monthly all-hands meetings to share what's happening across the companies. 5. Time off Yes, we do not track time-offs here, and yes we require pre-approval. It's rare that this request is denied. In fact, I've never had a case when I denied this request, or any managers deny it. Of course we need the approval in process, so we know these time-offs ahead, and prepare probably for other team members. It's a courtesy, and it's what a responsible person does.