Worked for 3+ years and had 7 (SEVEN) different managers during that time. Five got laid off in one of the many, many RIFs they did, and one got shifted to a different area in one of the many, many pointless reshufflings. Strategy changes every five minutes; no one has a clue what they’re doing, but then they present a clunky, half-assed demo during an All Hands like they just discovered the cure for cancer. The chat goes wild, the CEO praises the team… months go by and the demo never translates into a product, and when it does it’s just awful: buggy, not working, not solving real issues, and usually creating new problems.
The company raised $100M only six months ago. They hired three CTOs straight from McKinsey (the new CEO’s former company) who made 10x the salary of the prior CTO, with absolutely no hiring process. They were just appointed. Then each CTO came with a bunch of engineers, again all way more expensive than the current team, with no hiring process… but hey, we just got $100M, let’s set it on fire, why not?
Then they invited us all (450 people from all over the world) to a 4-day offsite in Punta Cana. The big team picture looked cool… but was it necessary? Nights on the beach listening to the delusional founder (because what self-respecting tech startup doesn’t have a delulu founder to cringe everyone out?) talking about ancient philosophy, soul-searching, higher purpose, quoting things in Chinese (I kid you not), while 400 people rolled their eyes simultaneously.
Those 5-star reviews on Glassdoor? The marketing team personally Slacked people to “encourage” them to post nice reviews prior to the Fund Raise. Then they created a whole different company, Meridial (powered by Invisible), to separate the negative remarks from Experts from the Invisible brand. Because why would you solve the actual problems that make people upset when you can just hide it under a new shiny brand?
Don’t get me started on how they treat “Experts”, the precarized workers who train AI for all the major model companies that hire us because we accept the risk of having thousands of workers we pay $10–15/hour, and then we ask why people aren’t showing up or doing good work. Well, MAYBE it’s because you pay them peanuts, treat them like garbage, and actively try to depersonalize them, putting layers of AI between the workers and the company… but hey, Legal made us do it. I truly hope AI trainers form a global union and put an end to this abuse.
Six months after getting $100M, with new laptops and a free ride to RD… another round of layoffs, because that’s just how we roll. Impromptu All Hands, CEO shows up looking distraught, sounding heavy as if he really cared (my eyes could not roll further back in my head), announcing, yet again, another workforce restructure. No Q&A, the call ends. Two minutes later you either get an invite from HR to walk you through your termination details or an email saying “You’ve not been impacted.” The bullet was close, but you’re safe. This time.
Just run away from here. I guess all AI startups are probably similar. But man, it’s a soul-crushing experience.