Strange culture, siloed, short sighted - Director Braintrust Employee Review

2.0
Oct 5, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

It's fully remote if that's your preferred working style, and many of the employees are hard workers. From a market addressability standpoint, Braintrust is in a good position: there are always needs for technical talent.

Cons

Perhaps it's because it's fully remote, but there's not much of a culture within the business. There are values, and time is paid during each all hands to call out people for fulfilling them in various ways, but it all felt very need-to-know and sterile during my time there; no real focus on getting to know the people you work with other than these weekly all-hands where 5 people talk and 35 strangers stare at each other. My experience was that it was a weird confederacy of teams as opposed to an actual company. It's siloed and information sharing is limited, however there is a desire to micromanage. The means of communication is also very strange. The default is to not have meetings and instead have discourse occur through Google doc comments. This leads to just tons and tons of back and forth with limited decision-making. The executive team is unwilling to put resources towards building the product or truly investing in the marketing function, and there's a consistent default to using contractor labor, which can leave some teams without a ton of institutional knowledge. The founders of the company have no real interest in the freelance community they need to operate the platform. For them, this is an economic experiment using a token to incentivize the community to work for something other than USD as often as possible.

Explore other reviews about Braintrust

5.0
Apr 27, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Opportunity for growth and promotion

Cons

Remote work makes it difficult to build professional relationships

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