Altruistic but very confused - Anonymous employee Acorns Employee Review

Execution of initiatives is pure chaos. Leadership makes 180° random knee-jerk organizationally intrusive decisions all the time up to and including completely undermining their previous decisions. I don’t think they understand change management very well at all. Communication is poor here and done in little pockets of secrecy. Product architectures mirror the communication structures of the organizations that build them. Make no mistake, this product is a hodgepodge of back-end chaos, identity crisis, and power struggles. It's a technology architecture manifestation of the conflicting egos of the people who designed them. This is a very cool outwardly facing organization on a superficial level, hiding absolute toxicity within its headquarter's four walls. The CTO's twitter tagline says, "I already know what technology you'll be using in five years." You have it straight from the horses' mouth - this is not technology built to flexibly adapt to ever-changing user needs and values. It's a product designed to funnel user's into someone else's rigid (and sometimes arrogant) ideas about what you should be doing with your money. The product management team take their queue from this same mindset, weaponizing the thinly veiled war cry "find a way" to make engineers compensate for poorly communicated plans through brute force. There are a lot of people telling other people how to build software and how long it must take, who have never actually built software. There are a lot of people telling programmers how to program, who have never written code. This could be such a great company if only the culture within resembled anything close to the public facing mission statement. If you are a rock-star hero, who enjoys constantly having to save the day for teams that are trying to catch their breath amidst pure chaos, this is the spot for you!