Rotten to the core - Product Owner Cyara Employee Review

Working for Cyara has given me an insight into what life must have been like in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s: Everybody knows they are part of a failing system. Managers give out targets that we all know are meaningless. People pretend to meet those targets by doing pretend work. It's an "AI company" without a data science team. It's a "Silicon Valley" company virtually nobody based in Silicon Valley. It's a "software testing" company whose dev managers don't even believe in testing. Leadership pretend that everything is just fine. Things that should be straightforward, like accessing information on customer product usage, are slowed down, obfuscated, stonewalled, and ultimately avoided because nobody wants know the truth. The signs of imminent collapse are all around. The products are stagnating, leadership is a cosy club who are ignorant to what is actually happening on the ground, and there is no understanding of immanent market challenges. Too much faith is given to the technobabble spouted by pseudo-experts whose eccentricity lend them an air of credibility in the eyes of an all-too-gullible management. Colleagues you were just in meetings with suddenly appear “deactivated” on Slack, gone without a trace. Every product decision now must go through endless committees - even committees to prepare for the committees - in order that decisions can be massaged and any blame spread as thinly as possible, so middle management can avoid being the next to be ‘deactivated’. Nobody wants to be seen to make a decision, because having an opinion, taking a risk, or making a mistake isn’t tolerated. The blame culture is so rife that everything has to be dumbed down into PowerPoint presentations, layered with spin and obfuscation. If you're someone who thrives on communicating and developing complex ideas as part of a team, your talents will be completely wasted here. There are folks who genuinely believe they are doing ‘agile’ but don’t see the irony in the endless committees and bureaucratic processes they require everyone do in order to satisfy their own egos makes Cyara the opposite of agile. The amount of waste is staggering. The HR department is virtually non-existent. People who’ve worked for the company for years are seen in tears around the office because of how bad the atmosphere is. The decline and fall of Cyara is sad, as it was once a great company.