Laid Off After being forced to move - Sales Enablement Specialist Upstart Employee Review

1.0
Jun 11, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They paid good, and their tech and wellness budget was great If you like not making calls and just getting a salary this is the place for you. Joe Karnes is the only good person left on the Auto Side and he is the only reason I would say the team is still running

Cons

If you are a female they will treat you like a second class citizen Their management team doesn't even know how to sell the product but expects everyone else to know how to They don't hold their teams accountable and then find a person to blame it on that isn't in management so they can continue to badly lead the team Fired all the women on the sales team and kept men that had open HR cases Openly sexist and when reported to HR they covered it up then "Laid off" the employees who filled the compliant Will pay you less if you are a women (Female employee got paid 10k less than the people who were hired 3 years after her and only changed it to her making the same once they were told that she was going to get a lawyer) This is just one scenario of men getting paid more If you are on a peer review bonus you will never fully bonus because of how these are handled and will give excuses to why they didn't give you a full bonus Very hard sale, and management will chew you out even though they are on ever single demo with you Sale VP is being micromanaged by the most sexist VP of another department that will openly tell you that you suck and not even know anything about your job or what you do They have employees that are remote but will expect you to come in especially if you are a female. (They required all the women to move back and said that they would be fired if they didn't) Marketing runs the whole Auto Retail side

Explore other reviews about Upstart

5.0
Jun 11, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Promising product, competitive pay, lots of work

Cons

Unstable, leadership is hit or miss

2.0
Jun 10, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Compensation. Only reason I don't give them 1 star. - Remote Work - Pretty diverse

Cons

- incredible amount of politics, process, and red tape for an engineering org on the smaller side - Chaos. There were three re-orgs between Fall 2025 and Spring 2026. Actual madness. - High turnover is embraced. They will gladly let go of long time high performers with years of tribal knowledge and hire someone new with more experience. You eventually up with a team where everyone has hardly any domain knowledge. - Fear driven environment. You will hear performance mentioned every week in company comms and how they want everyone to be X% more productive with AI. - Speaking of AI usage, they take it to the next level. Slack messages, Jira tickets, code, design documents. All made with AI. It will be the most overly verbose word slop you can think of and you'll get a pat on the back for being so thorough. My manager seriously told me how she just copied a technical design doc into chatgpt and read that. Wild. - Cutthroat. With the new focus on productivity gains and measuring performance with PR volume, LOC, and token usage, people hardly review PRs anymore because it gets them nothing. Be prepared to spend lots of time begging your team and other teams for reviews and then waiting. Unless you are good at playing politics and have the time / energy for it, I would avoid this place at all costs. If you are just looking for something short term that pays well and encourages you to use AI for any and everything, this place works well, just don't expect to stick around for long as you're considered a veteran at 2 years with all the turnover they have. I'm glad I left for something else when I did because I see on linkedin they've had more layoffs since.

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