Stamped Reviews

- New leadership came in, fired existing leadership and laid off 40% of the company, 80% of which was in the eng department. This was done without an understanding of the technical space and so now they're drowning in issues they didn't know existed. - Fixing fundamental problems was put off for years already and is now becoming an insurmountable issue. - Leadership is more focused on drinking the AI-is-everything kool-aid than fixing real problems for existing customers while not having the ability to add worthwhile new features to the existing dumpster fire of a code base. - When things hit the fan engineering (which somehow was viewed by the rest of the company as "in charge") got blamed for everything despite them fighting for years to be given the opportunity to fix critical legacy issues that severely impacted the ability to deliver new value.

The platform expanded into ~200 repositories and extensive microservice fragmentation, with heavy Terraform templating. This increased coordination overhead and infrastructure cost. For a reviews-focused product (structured text + ratings), IO/network-heavy service boundaries introduced measurable latency in core workflows (e.g., dashboard load times). Infrastructure and inter-service traffic grew disproportionate to the actual domain complexity. Several outdated or effectively unmaintained dependencies increased operational friction and technical risk. There was strong resistance to adopting modern productivity tooling — including AI-assisted development — which materially limited experimentation and engineering velocity. Restructuring and cost-cutting efforts impacted morale.