Coworkers are great, leadership & company culture is VERY bad - Anonymous employee CircleIn Employee Review

This going to be long… CircleIn produces an app for students. I can’t give more details than that because of NDA, but their website has more information about the app. The CEO micromanages and doesn’t seem to actually trust his teams to create a good product (even explaining to seasoned engineers their own job) leading to the product not being good. The company triumphs its few success stories, but in reality they are constantly putting out fires for embellishing the product’s capabilities, promising customers to add features just to make a sale, then rushing the production and design leading to severe technical faults down the line and overall, an extremely bad product that does not work or produce consistently positive outcomes. One contracted engineer confided in me that he felt like a work mule - he left (or might have been terminated) shortly after. Turnover is high. Benefits and pay do not match what the leadership expects. I worked basically seven days a week, at all hours of the day. This might have changed since I left, but when I took time off, my pay was garnished. There was no PTO, sick time, or paid holidays. Because of the CEO’s pervasive micromanaging, despite the engineering team’s best efforts to implement an effective agile/rapid iteration environment, nothing gets done and everything is done poorly. CEO cannot stick to plans set by very knowledgeable engineers and designers (although I don’t believe they have a design team). CEO does not heed warnings from employees who know more/better than him about product design, production, or user feedback. CEO does not take no for an answer and disregards the feedback of employees and students who are using the product themselves. CEO had a fickle understanding of the actual product, and he would change course in the middle of major redesigns, even if the engineers had already spent half the sprint working on a feature proposed by the CEO two weeks prior. During my final days at CircleIn, CEO insinuated that they would be forced to hire a white man with more experience to replace me if I did not “step up”, even though I was overworked, underpaid, and not given the resources or space to succeed - essentially making “diversity” my responsibility to preserve. CEO would often forget to submit payroll on time, leading to delayed paychecks. He would offer to Venmo paychecks “if anyone needed the money right away”, which is unprofessional. Before I was terminated, I was questioned over the phone about if I was “even passionate” about the job/company/product/mission. I was honest and said that I wasn’t, even though I used to be. I outlined my grievances, explaining that leadership was out of touch, and I was burnt out, and my opinions were disregarded. CEO began to ask me for a detailed list of tasks I had done throughout the day. When I sent leadership a message giving criticism and feedback about the way they were handling employees, production, and student feedback, I received radio silence for two weeks. When the CEO finally responded, he simply said we will have a call. I was terminated not long afterwards, and he framed it as “giving me an opportunity to explore other interests”, never actually saying the words “you are being terminated”. I got two week’s worth of pay as severance. Additionally, before my final days at CircleIn, internal meetings without the CEO turned into complaining sessions about management. Some employees even cried and complained that they were having severe anxiety every morning because of the hostile and disordered work environment. Lastly, this is public information available with a quick Google search: CircleIn was given an NSF grant to collect data to produce predictive studying results within the app. During my time, they did not use the grant money for these purposes, and they would scramble to make documents showing “progress” on their objectives whenever there were meetings with the NSF program manager for the grant. Predictive studying was not their main priority—signing monetary contracts with schools was their priority. I would not recommend working here.