Pros
People who are associates and supervisors are chill and relatable. Anyone else above that is kind of a pandora's box. Work-life balance is generally okay, until it isn't. Then it's virtually non-existent. Decent severance.
Cons
We laid of 19% of people yesterday; last month, our CEO said we wouldn't in front of the whole company at all-hands. This is on top of a handful of people choosing to leave over the past couple of weeks, including our whole QA team. Our CEO said the decision was made because of a tough fundraising environment, largely due to our burn rate and lackluster sales. One detail he mentioned, one that I still have a hard time overlooking, is the fact that the board warned the founders about this months ago. They said that our burn rate was too high, that our sales were below par, and that we'd struggle with fundraising. Instead of bracing the team for impact, and being honest about our situation, he told the board hold his beer. The beer has since gone flat, and 14 people were let go. This includes junior employees hired just a few months ago, as well as those here on work visas. While they were let go with decent severance packages, it's hard not to overlook the fact that they'd be in a better position if the company had been transparent a couple months ago. What's the point of buying them a couple weeks after the fact, when they could've had a couple months to prepare? An unfortunate reality of XP is that the people in charge of XP will gladly play with fire and smoke, because they'll never be the ones to bear the brunt of the flames. Sure, they can take cuts to their bonuses; the founders can take cuts to their pay. But you can't honestly think that compares to the junior employees who had the start of their career sabotaged, the visa workers who need to completely rethink their future, and everyone else who no longer have an income. Especially in the backdrop of an extremely competitive job market, and struggling economy. Those who weren't let go were immediately being fed a narrative normalizing this as a part of business (sure), and that this time, surely, we have a "conservative" model that we can trust. What trust is there left to offer? What faith is left to give? How could one possibly believe in a future promised by those who led us to this disaster at the present? I'm tired of seeing good people get hurt, misled, and expended.
