It doesn't get better - Technical Writer Sourcegraph Employee Review

- Glitters but ain't gold: Like many tech startups, it sounds cool on paper but doesn't work well in practice. This company is growing far too fast to nail down reasonable goals and establish a healthy culture. After they rope you in with their initial investment, you're on your own. Employees just try to avoid being the scapegoat when things go wrong. But things go wrong because the CEOs have moved the goal post yet again, running after the next shiny object. - Be your own best friend: Because, as I mentioned before, you're on your own. There is no onboarding, just tons and tons of tribal knowledge hidden away in dusty documents, if it's documented at all. They balk at suggestions to improve the onboarding process despite multiple comments from new employees citing the same issues. - The CEOs: One of the CEOs acts as if someone told him he was a diversity hire and he has made it his mission to make everyone else suffer to prove a point. He has a habit of publicly shaming other employees and criticizing their work without ever having participated in the process leading up to it. The horrendous, misanthropic things he's said will eventually bite him, but he continues as if none of it can be documented or exhibited in a reddit community. The other CEO is his enabler, putting nice (but empty) words over the boo-boos to smooth things over, never actually putting any muscle into accountability or change. Neither of them has any real experience in the workforce besides their expensive private university, so they have no idea how to manage people, let alone have realistic expectations. - Hire fast, fire faster: My gut instinct told me this was not the job for me when they abruptly fired the majority of the marketing team after less than a month on the job. The "official" reason was that they'd "failed to meet their goals". But in reality, no goals were ever set (or even clarified) for anyone involved. It was purely political and absolutely wrongful. There was no improvement plan, no evaluation period, no communication, no direction. I naively stayed on, placated by false resolutions from the higher-ups and a determination to make the best of what I had. - Fake woke culture: Every word and every value painstakingly written into the Code of Conduct received pushback from one of the CEOs, despite the fact that some of it was already there. That should tell you a lot about the culture. It's all a sham. Although most of the other employees are nice, there is no support from higher-ups for inclusivity in any form. They claim to love assertiveness and care about the quality of work, but they hate hearing "no". Even if the expectation is ridiculous, even if the reasoning is valid, even if the potential fallout is disastrous. But it'll be your fault (not theirs) when it goes wrong anyway. - One way or the highway: I was so happy when they decided to reorganize my department. Little did I know I'd be worse off than I started. Product has no idea how documentation works and has zero experience managing it, and they inform their expectations with a rigidity that is characteristic of people with no knowledge. Even worse, they refuse to understand that there is more than one way to do things. Technical writing is inherently collaborative. Management that doesn't understand this instead fills up valuable time with pointless micromanaging to force interaction--gathering feedback too soon for documents that aren't ready for review, from teammates who don't even read correctly to answer questions, and making a bunch of useless noise in the team chats to keep everyone "in the loop". The final nail in the coffin was a noticeable lack of support for team members that aren't favorites. If management wasn't directly involved in hiring you with that unnecessarily drawn-out process (that was made for hiring designers, by the way) then you're not going to be treated with the same care. But you might be publicly shamed at company meetings.