Paddle Reviews

Ever since the last funding round and Profitwell acquisition, the company is losing its culture. Decisions are made top-down without communication to the wider team. No space for genuine feedback to those announcements or changes either since most of the "higher-ups" don't even know who the team is and haven't booked time in (it's impossible to find time with them too). Diversity has gone out the window, we've lost a lot of women in the past few months and nobody seems to care. "We're working on it" is what we always hear but no tangible examples have been put forward. Everyone is focused on just delivering things instead of taking care of the team and culture or making sure both teams (profitwell and paddle) find common ground. American culture is notably different and there's no plan on how to handle that. If the company is aware and doing something about it, it is not communicated to anyone other than the ones talking about it. Teams are losing their ability to strategise (even though it's an essential aspect for some roles) because "higher-ups" weren't trained as managers, don't know how to communicate, and are accumulating decisions that maybe they shouldn't. Some Profitwell employees came to Paddle with a much higher seniority than they should when comparing to the Paddle standard, simply because Profitwell was already calling them senior/specialist/etc. There needs to be clarity around what to expect from everyone. And that's not mentioning the salary differences, that's a whole other issue. All of this is feedback was given to managers time and time again in the past 2-3 months from different people in different departments and they're happy staying where they are simply because "the economy is bad" and there are no additional resources to focus on these things AND on delivering what was promised. Seems to me like the current management doesn't know what to do when a company is in a tough spot, but the individual contributors are the ones that suffer from it.

There's a top layer of management that floats on top of the engineering department and poisons the culture. It's uniformly made up of cishet white men who bully and manipulate those below them. You will absolutely be blamed for their mistakes, and convinced that you're not good enough. You will be manipulated to work too many hours, being told that you're not delivering or living up to expectations. If you're not part of the in-group, you will never see a promotion or recognition for your achievements. You will receive encouragement to put in extra efforts to contribute to work culture event such as hackathons, but don't expect to ever see recognition or reward for such things. Any effort on your part to call out problems or to improve the culture will result in you being accused of being the cause of the problem. Management frequently make dumb decisions and blame those under them when it doesn't pan out. The codebase's quality reflects the dysfunctional team culture. If you're not a cishet white dudebro, you probably aren't going to have a great time in the engineering department.