Company is exhausting to work for. Projects don't start with deadlines, they start with "to be released as soon as possible". Ie, no matter how quickly you complete it, it's already late. It's impossible to get ahead of any work and you will always be under pressure. To be fair, the pressure isn't explicit or extreme, but it is constant, and over time it becomes demotivating. You cannot do a 'good' job, or do anything extra because that will take more time. It's the bare-minimum MVP always. And anyway if you take the time to put an extra animation or user-friendly element in, it will not be noticed or appreciated.
Tech department has some serious structural issues. Communication / negotiation is very poor, and it is not being managed by the upper management. There is a large backend but the company has no dedicated backend engineers, it is created by the researchers who are very clever but not experienced in creating sensible APIs for mobile use. The company refuses to have any QA on staff at all, relying on an external testing company who has limited domain knowledge.
There is an intransigence in the management that is harming the company, a belief that the things that they know are correct and cannot be challenged. Absolutely they should be proud that they have built a successful company, but from there should be some awareness that they have also built that from very young, and have no experience in other working environments. There are stubborn beliefs that are not shared in any other company I've worked for. Upper management do not get stuck in to tackle problems, they prefer to sit back and maintain the status quo.
Company feels cold. Recently there was a large round of redundancies, and it was delivered in a robotic way. Redundancy package was close to the legal minimum, and nowhere near the level that a big tech company would offer (even though the company is regularly thinking of itself as at that level). CEO and CTO did not speak or email to those laid off once, no contrition, no thanks for service, no apology that this had to be done, no goodbye.
