Pros
Most coworkers are extremely talented and a pleasure to work with. Nothing else.
Cons
The only concept of "leadership" understood by executives at this company is that of an authoritarian hierarchy wherein a handful of deeply inexperienced executives brand themselves as the sole source of the truth while constantly trying to distract from their incompetencies. This means irrespective of your qualifications, experience, or objective reality - working here will require you to reject what you know to be true and embrace their consistently unsuccessful way of doing things. At surface level the outlook is concerning enough. For over 10 years the same core group has unsuccessfully attempted to commercialize technology born out of an academic lab. With pivots from biopharma to defense to art to luxury goods without any commercial success to show for it - it’s clear the folks at the top are desperately searching for a problem their widget can solve, and they're failing miserably. The clock is ticking while employees routinely cycle in and out as they are slowly broken by this environment. Let’s dive into how they got here. On your way in, you will likely be sold a distorted reality. You sense a degree self-awareness about what is currently broken in the company along with an open desire to bring in experienced contributors that can help turn the tide. One by one, each person brought in for this purpose has had their enthusiasm and passion irrevocably snuffed out. It is snuffed out because while “leadership” feigns self awareness, once you’re inside you realize it is openly understood by all levels that they are simply incapable of growth or change, and the business is doomed because of it. Any attempt to collaboratively or optimistically help folks break through this barrier only yields frustration and friction as “leaders” are forced to face their own inadequacies and inevitably shut down the conversation. “Leadership” will evaluate you against a rubric that they have never come close to meeting even 10% of themselves. They do not exhibit any general professional competencies or recognizable standard of excellence outside of the narrow field of expertise offered by their PhDs, yet they'll use this to claim authority over nearly all domains. It’s widely understood the CEO can’t/wont read anything longer than a page. The company uses slack, but the CEO refuses to participate and demands special communication treatment. The CEO recommends books on management concepts he clearly hasn’t actually read or understood based on his lack of recognition of those concepts as they are proposed for use at DUST. Any attempt to gently teach them something they don’t know is perceived as arrogance. DUST’s “leaders” want to cosplay business executives without understanding what it actually takes to be successful, and their track record shows it. Simply put, none of the core “leadership” have ever worked at a proper company themselves and have no concept of what of what actual accountability to another a coworker looks like. It’s unfathomable to them to think that accountability between managers and reports should even be bidirectional. They are woefully inadequate in fulfilling their roles as “leaders” to set clear, consistent priorities for the business, to organize and support folks to plan and deliver on projects, or to manage resources effectively and efficiently. From an operational planning perspective, they're neck and neck with a 6 year old’s first lemonade stand. Yet, in spite of this, if you disagree with even one iota of their contrived reality and attempt to bring in mature operations, you are labeled out of place and disruptive. Working at DUST is entirely exploitative. There is no recognition whatsoever of your career goals, what skills you want to use and grow, or what is rewarding for you. In order to get you in the door, you'll be encouraged to take initiative and apply yourself wherever you feel you can contribute. Once you're inside, the urgency of the latest dumpster fire will always require you to focus in on the bare minimum, mundane tasks they need you to crank out with as little transparency, context, or empowerment possible. Your sole purpose is to generate outputs for them to use to be successful - not for your success, not for your growth. Before you know it, the role you're working is leagues different than what you thought you were signing up for. All of this to say nothing of their gross negligence around employee safety in the lab. They will routinely encourage you to perform activities that are not completely sound from a safety perspective, assuring you "it'll be fine, people do this all the time". Often the safety standard of a fast-and-loose academic environment is the reference for what is OK in a business. It takes repeated efforts to prove to them they're wrong before you are able to take an alternative course. Management is aware of all of this, yet does nothing to change. “Leadership” has a phrase to describe a recurring phenomenon, “resetting the table”, where over the course of months and years of dysfunctional, stressful, and psychologically damaging ways of working culminate in a wave of essential contributors becoming fed up and leaving the company. “Resetting the table” is the process of restaffing with fresh faces that have not yet suffered the abuse and indignities of working for this “leadership” group while moving forward without any attempt to rectify the underlying issues. As this cycle continues, it becomes clear that the only employees remaining at the company are those that have not found another job *yet*, and those that are joining to “reset the table” are largely those too inexperienced to recognize the dumpster fire they’re walking into. The “leaders” of this company are a masterclass exhibit of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They exist at the apex of the canonical chart, possessing extraordinary confidence in their abilities but simply don't know enough about what successful leadership and management look like in order to know how far away they are from actual competency. Throughout this review I've referred to them as "leadership" in quotations because they are clearly not worthy of the word. They are in their positions solely because of circumstance in the right place at the right time one day -- no one in their right minds would hire them to those roles today, particularly in hindsight. I’d say I hope they figure it out, but we all know they won’t.