Boundless Immigration Reviews

There were a lot of problems at Boundless, which ultimately for me ended up being too overwhelming to stay. In a lot of ways, I feel as though leadership (meaning much of the management team, although much of this criticism is directly on the CEO, despite my not having working much with him) pushed me out, which was really sad and disappointing. From my early days at Boundless, I was told that leadership wanted feedback and constructive criticism. At that point, only my manager had any experience in a leadership role, and it felt like they wanted to improve. There were instances where I gave them tough feedback, and initially it felt like they were listening. But eventually I learned they listened, but didn't seem to internalize or really hear the feedback. I was there for a little over two years, long enough to see recurring patterns in the way that leadership behaved, especially when it came to the treatment of non-product teams and how product decisions were bottle-necked. I started to see repercussions to the criticism I was giving, including accusations of being non-collaborative, a negative cultural influence, and of assuming bad intentions. These accusations felt very gendered (I’m a woman), especially in light of all the positive comments I was getting from individual teammates. The amount of emotional labor I was being asked to put into interactions was exhausting; I spent far too much time trying to cater to the comfort of people with much more power than me. Meanwhile, leadership was making the very same mistakes over and over again. (And also making new mistakes that would have been easy to avoid if they’d bothered to get input from the teams.) I watched people get more and more wary about trying to fix problems, as the repercussions got stiffer. I was given feedback that my "lack of trust" of leadership was a barrier to promotion; when I pointed out that leadership had done a number of untrustworthy things, that was waved off and I was told "leadership is not going to change." By the time I left, I would say Boundless had developed a culture of fear. Many employees were too nervous to speak out as working conditions worsened. Several people left without jobs lined up. (During the pandemic.) There were lots of many small incidents while I was there that led me to believe that leadership was not paying attention to individual contributors who were experts in different areas. The final straw for me happened because I felt that leadership was not take the data security of our customers seriously enough. While many startups play pretty fast and loose with security every company that I know of that deals with customer personal identifying information (PII) requires at the very least a background check on the employees that are going to be able to access that information. Trying to deal with a large backlog of customers in a short amount of time, Boundless leadership decided that that wasn’t necessary. As an engineer with some experience in cyber security, I pushed the engineering team to draw a line and insist on security restrictions. The response from leadership is unfathomable to me. They insisted on moving forward; I had to be in several very heated meetings in order to get the barest protections for our users. I understand the desire to move fast is baked in the startup model, but there are certain risks that are unacceptable. I wasn’t surprised that leadership hadn’t thought about the risks they were taking with our customers’ data; but their response in the face of my and the rest of the engineer team’s expertise was frankly distressing. I can’t be sure, as I was not invited into the higher-level meetings where decisions were made, but it felt like it stemmed from an inability to listen to feedback that didn’t validate their beliefs.

This company has shown time and time again that it does not care about its employees. The customer success teams are extremely overworked and underpaid. The workloads are so large, every individual works 10-20 hours of overtime every week, and still falls short of expectations. Management will continuously entice its employees with possible promotions only to force individuals to perform duties above their pay grade and deny any requests for compensation increases. They are only interested in getting the most bang for their buck. They want to get employees to do as much as they can for as little compensation as possible, even if that means they need to hire and train new employees every now and then. They would rather do this than pay people what they are worth. It is clear that this company does not value its employees at all.