HBR case study on how to run a company to the ground - Operations SynapseFI Employee Review

It's almost a tragedy to see how the fate of this company is going - what legitimately was a billion-dollar concept is being destroyed due to the tyrannical, egotistical CEO who treats the company as his serfdom and imposes unnecessary requirements that he himself ignores. This is a man who never had a boss, and thus, has absolutely no concept of what is required to be a good one. This is a man who doesn't believe in providing training guides to employees, rather thinks that new employees should be able to find the information themselves, and then publicly erupts and berates them when their understanding of the product isn't to par with his after a month on the job. During my tenure as an employee, almost all of the engineers with past experience and/or degrees left the company, to be replaced by recent boot-camp graduates with limited experience. Although some would spin this willingness to hire diverse employees that would never be candidates for more established companies as a sign of the company’s divergent process, I would argue that being in conjunction with the lack of training, mentorship, tools or support to do the job well, this stems more as a ploy to hire cheap labor who can be taken advantage of due to their lack of experience. I’m also not convinced that the CEO doesn’t hire new grads in order to maintain a sense of superiority regarding his technical ability compared to his staff. It appears that this might be changing due to recent C-level hires, including a technical lead. For the sake of everyone, I hope that the CEO actually is giving them the autonomy and support to successfully do their jobs. The company culture is at best non-existent and at worst toxic. In retrospect, I recognize that the morose faces and lack of any acknowledgement by coworkers when I started were symptoms of collective unhappiness. Innovative thinking and collaboration was discouraged unless you’re one of a select few – you’re expected to come in, do as you’re told, and not talk. Don’t expect any feedback or constructive criticism, or any acknowledgement at all unless it’s a curt request to explain your error. In the race to automate as many “best-in-class financial products” as possible, the focus is so much on the automation part that they seem to forget that it’s people and not robots working behind the scenes. Also, the product sucks. Concerns with quality are routinely ignored in order to pursue the shiny new thing which isn’t even done right.