Pros
I spent 25% of my adult life relentlessly executing on Noah’s vision. I was laid off in a very cruel way. The layoffs were communicated poorly, the timing was a few weeks before my new promotion would go into effect and they necessary post layoff communication was severely lacking.
Cons
Decision making from leadership is questionable at best. The CEO has brought in extremely inept leaders both as individual hires, as well as through acquisitions. This has corroded the trust in leadership and how employees view the future of the business. After the first couple poor hires, I thought the company would do their due diligence before making the mistake again. That was not the case. As evident by past reviews here, the exec team is well aware of issues facing the company and have been for quite awhile (years). Rather than addressing them head on, only two things seem to happen. 1. The CEO is becomes more and more insulated and is no longer actually hearing employee feedback (the alternative is that he doesn’t care) 2. The People team adds another superficial perk to pretend like they are invested in making the workplace better Pre-IPO the engineering pipeline moved slow for a start-up. Post IPO, things move a glacial pace. Simple things that should take hours to get done, take days at Olo. The company is not “fast paced” nor do they take advantage of technical or process optimizations available. In fact, they were often adding new processes that slowed down development work. There is no structure for teams to communicate with each other. It was not rare for duplicate OR conflicting work to be done by various teams. This caused a lot of rework and headaches all around and lead to feature release delays. Olo is trying to operate like a mature company, but the proper foundation was never laid leading to constant fumbles. Finally, Olo as a business has a very big mountain ahead of it. They made a big bet on a new area of the business. This area is in total chaos and it will take a herculean effort to make it successful. With the current leadership team, I highly doubt they will be able to pull it off, at least in a reasonable timeframe. This could have been avoided if some basic fact finding was done. If you value mental health, growth, transparency and autonomy, I highly suggest you do not take a role at Olo.