The board appears to be chasing a quick dollar over the core mission of improving the produce market. They are actively trying to shift the focus of the company with the explicit goal of making the company look better to investors, and doing it in such a way that I suspect they are angling for an exit over building a sustainable company.
The board has also cut or denied bonuses (for multiple years for some employees) based upon metrics that most employees didn't have control over. It makes them seem petty and penny-pinching. Some teams saw the writing on the wall and manipulated their statistics to ensure their bonuses. At this point, I don't trust them at all, and they don't appear to have respect for the team.
The biggest shift has been the new CTO. (Oh, and the COO got their bonus based on hiring him.) Krates came in and brought a dozen people with him. All of these people slotting in above all the existing engineering staff, so anyone who was working on their career path suddenly had a bunch of people ahead of them regardless of prior effort. There are genuinely good people in this batch of hires, so what's happened isn't really on them.
Krates attitude is toxic. He does not show basic respect for the work that has been done to get the company to this point, instead denigrating all that work. He does this not only in all-team meetings, but even in 1:1s where it is irrelevant to the individual. He does not acknowledge that all work is done under constraints. He does not assume positive intent for those who came before him. His attitude toward Product is not one of cooperation, and so it isn't likely a coincidence that 75% of the PMs gave notice within a few weeks time. Another individual was shifted into PM work, and they gave notice too. I would guess that in the next few months, most of the engineers with tenure will be gone (quite a few already have left). I'm still not sure if this was part of the plan (by Krates or the board), or if they genuinely didn't realize that these actions would lead to the huge loss of institutional knowledge that it has.
When all coding stopped in January 2022, it was with the pretense that we were going to explore options as a team. That included potentially continuing some prior work. The end result, however, was a decision to do what the new people wanted to do. Several people reported having genuinely investigated options, only to have the most sensible solution shot down while praising the options that seem to have been a foregone conclusion. This added to the sense of disrespect for existing engineers' time and efforts.
It's likely that in a few months, everyone remaining in Engineering will be happy with the state of affairs. They will all be part of the in-group or those few engineers where the changes have provided them with an opportunity to learn. Then everything will ride on whether the ambitious plan to re-write the entire systems in 2-and-a-half months actually works out to the board's liking.
The diversity cons: I don't think there are any black coworkers out of the more than 200 people here. Maybe they just aren't visible, but it stood out when the company put out a video for International Women's Day but hadn't put out anything for Black History Month. Additionally, the engineering team is heavily male. There are a few women and non-binary, but the company could do better, as it feels like typical tech laziness.
