Great place to work - Anonymous employee ReadMe Employee Review

ReadMe is a fun place to work with a team that really cares about people. It's clear that when decisions are made, they're made with a lot of empathy and with everyone who works here in mind. There's a focus on making this a great place to work that I've never seen in another company and to be honest, I don't know if it even exists in the same way anywhere else. The ways that ReadMe takes care of the team are personal, it's a step beyond our stellar health insurance and competitive salaries. Everyone knows everyone here and there's so much care that goes into every little detail. We are a remote company but still have opportunities throughout the year to get together in person and rebuild bonds that can often get strained by only seeing each other through Slack and Zoom. Any time I need help, or have a question, or even just want to chat I know that I can reach out and have a team of people who are excited to be there for me. I love the people here and the job that I get to do with them!

This is a fantastic place to work but I could see it not being the right place for you if you'd prefer to simply clock in and clock out. There's so much focus on team work and diving deeper that even though there's a huge emphasis on work life balance, working at ReadMe is best if you really want to connect.

- Coworkers are, for the most part, genuinely kind, fun, intelligent people who work hard and support each other. It can feel cliquey but for the most part people are pretty cool. - If you're in the "in-crowd," you'll be compensated very well and probably have a great time - The below issues used to be less obvious, and may be more manageable in time; maybe that's something you're willing to put up with in the workplace

If you've ever wanted to work at a stereotypical startup that touts a fun, laid-back culture and says they care about all the right things (DEI, mental health, work/life balance, etc.) in a way that can only be described as delusional, this is your chance. The CEO is extremely unprofessional on a regular basis. He blatantly plays favorites and just as blatantly picks a random victim to harass, until he's either bullied them into quitting or he can fabricate a reason to fire them. It should be noted that his favorites are almost always men, while his bullying targets almost never are. Due to this behavior, there is no longer an HR team, because he drove them all out. The team was all women of color and most of them were LGBTQ. Draw your own conclusions. He very clearly has unresolved issues and is now intent on being the cool kid in the room and making the other cool kids like him, at the cost of everything else. The workplace is not the time or place to fix your high school "I had to eat alone at lunch" trauma. Getting on Hacker News will not make people like you. More importantly, it won't necessarily make more money for the company. But here we are. He openly talks badly about one engineering pod in front of another engineering pod, or talks about employees behind their backs to other employees. He'll trauma-dump whenever it’s convenient for whatever point he's trying to make. At an offsite we sat through a long talk about his history with narcissistic abuse. He used it as an excuse to go on about how most CEOs are narcissists - but not him! He was actively rude to an employee who was leaving *because of her cancer returning,* IN FRONT OF OTHER EMPLOYEES. This was after he had a notably different attitude about her going on leave for health issues vs. one of his favorites going on leave for health issues. Ages ago we did an employee satisfaction survey where people raised questions about DEI, pay transparency, leveling, etc. He got mad about the complaints, never addressed any of them, and hasn't done another survey since. He also hired a DEI consultant several years back, who gave specific and pretty mild feedback. All of that advice got ignored, and all of the issues the consultant mentioned have only gotten worse. His ability to say he cares about his employees, DEI, yada yada with a straight face is almost impressive, given that I haven't seen any concrete evidence for that in my tenure here and have really only seen evidence to the contrary. This complete lack of self-awareness and self-reflection trickles down from the CEO. It's impossible to get away from, and affects the company on every level. The office manager left? Guess it's time to push additional admin work onto some of the younger women at the office. That's not sexist or anything. And if it was, it’s not like there's an HR manager to report it to anyways. The CEO and the COO (who also has many of these issues) have some kind of weird toxic frenemy dynamic and will fully engage in it in front of employees. It’s uncomfortable, to say the least. Nobody wants to feel like they’re stuck between mom and dad fighting in the workplace. There's a systemic aversion to any kind of documentation or systems, because the CEO wants the company to function “like a jazz band, not an orchestra.” It would be funny, if it wasn't so frustrating to deal with. Be prepared to spend hours troubleshooting something, only to find out that it's a known issue - it’s just not documented anywhere except for some random Slack convo. There's no official company documentation for FMLA or other HR basics. This freewheeling attitude extends to both non-compete clauses and NDAs, to a degree that has financially impacted the company more than once. Why not give a contractor all of our trade secrets, without making them sign anything, so they can go build a competing product? Pay transparency doesn't exist. Clear leveling expectations are a fantasy. You may not ever be told clear expectations about your work and role. At least, not until you’ve got on someone’s bad side. Your manager might openly lie to you about what your coworkers are making, or whether or not they got raises, in an attempt to placate you because you asked too many questions. If you don’t care about company culture, well rest assured, this also affects the bottom line. If Greg decides he wants to build something, by golly, he'll make the team build it, whether or not any customer has ever asked for it, without talking to any potential customers or doing any kind of concept validation whatsoever. He will beat that dead horse until it is a pile of broken bones, even if it's been an uphill battle to get ANY customers from day one and we're now on day 365+. As far as I can tell, the reason we don’t have a CTO any more is because he got so annoyed at being overridden and micromanaged around technical decisions that he quit. Projects aren't scoped well or at all, so they take way longer than planned. In the meantime, we’re losing paying customers, because we haven't developed the features they've been asking for for years. That creates more pressure for success, which gets put onto the people at the bottom doing the work. This has created an environment where everyone at the company is concerned about our long-term future, but nobody has any power to change it. Maybe this next series of launches will be a success, customers will stop churning, and the overall work environment will improve. It’s hard to say. It wasn't anywhere near this bad when I started. I'm not holding my breath for improvement, though.