Terrible Leadership Sinking the Company - Anonymous employee CouchSurfing Employee Review

There are so many awful things about working at Couchsurfing that it's difficult to know where to start. As a VERY quick summary: 1. The leadership trio of CEO/COO/CProductO is absolutely terrible, totally unqualified in every imaginable way (including technically), abusive, and both the genesis and propagation of everything that's wrong with the company (which is a lot) 2. Day-to-day operations of the company are in the hands of the CPO who, though hardworking, is totally unqualified for such responsibilities and has no relevant experience 3. Morale is absolutely terrible because people are jumping ship like crazy, leadership's abusiveness/incompetence is becoming more transparent as time goes, and the rules for the new office in San Francisco enforced by the COO are draconian For more detail, here's a list of some stuff that makes Couchsurfing a really, really miserable place to work: * The CEO is fatally allergic to criticism or feedback. For example, the company briefly tried using an anonymous feedback tool. Some of the feedback was negative, and perhaps critical of leadership or its decisions. The CEO then yelled at the company on an all-hands meeting and scrapped the feedback tool immediately. There has never been any replacement. When feedback is given non-anonymously, you should prepare to be targeted, harassed, and/or fired * The CEO displays little respect for employees, which manifests itself in many ways, including apparently believing that everyone is paid too much, that he can schedule meetings with you on federal and/or religious holidays, being late for meetings with no warning, frequently breaking company rules and norms, and more * The CEO & COO in general intentionally foster a consistent pattern of behavior to deceive, mislead, manipulate, gaslight, and/or (publicly) shame people regarding compensation discussions. Employees often take on additional responsibilities for months to years at a time under material representations that a raise will be coming, only to be harassed, gaslighted, manipulated, and/or (publicly) shamed when finally asking for what they were told they would receive. Several employees have not received raises for years. The CEO & COO's attitude about this is smirking and cavalier * The CEO (and sometimes COO & CPO too) frequently lie about why employees are no longer with the company -- for example, there have been MULTIPLE recent instances of people being fired, but the C-trio then says the person quit. Keep in mind this is a small company, so it's a significant percentage of our employees. Other employees always find out the truth, which has simply led to greater and greater distrust of the C-trio, who already have almost zero trust or faith from employees * The CEO provides absolutely no meaningful transparency into anything because he seems to prefer to make up whatever "truth" about the company is convenient for his argument at the moment. One minute, he'll say the company is doing fine and making money safely. But a minute later, if you ask about raises, the company is just barely making it and no, we can't give you a raise this year either, sorry. These obvious flip-flops lead to yet more loss of trust. * The CEO repeatedly claims that we are an "early stage venture" despite that fact that it's well over a decade old, now nearing two decades. It's an obvious lie, and people lose yet more trust. It's also just an extremely bizarre statement that you have to be very out of touch with reality to make. * The CTO quit and has not been replaced for months. It seemed clear to employees that the CTO left to avoid working beside the CEO. * The effort to find a new CTO is led exclusively by the C-trio, none of whom have any non-trivial technology background or qualifications. The search is also being geared to find someone to breathe down developers' necks rather than someone who can actually accomplish things technically, which is insane given the already unbalanced manager:contributor ratio. The company is slated to soon have basically the same number of managers/owners as actual contributors (i.e., developers and designers). Feedback against this has been ignored * The company is mixed remote/in-person but does a poor job of mixing the two and shows no signs of improvement. Many employees are laughably bad at handling remote work and take inordinate amounts of time to respond to requests (sometimes days). Some even have an away message asking you to email them. The company has employees in time zones all over the world which leads to sync problems, which have been ignored despite feedback. * The structure of the teams is completely nonsensical. Designers are on the "product team," even though they work exclusively with either the web team or mobile team, meaning the people who actually depend on their work have absolutely no influence on their workload. Project managers are on two teams? Maybe? No one knows. * The CPO (Product) is entirely unqualified to run a company, but for some reason has seemingly absolute authority, especially over final decisions. It's mostly because if you disagree, she basically threatens to tell on you to the CEO, and no one feels like getting fired over [insert random issue here] -- which is a very real outcome should that happen. Even when the CPO is outvoted by actual contributors, she enforces her ideas anyway using this threat strategy. * The CPO more or less required the entire company to fly to Spain for a "design sprint" on two weeks' notice. The bait was that team members would suggest ideas and build some demos while there. The switch was that the CPO made everyone build her ideas anyway instead of the ideas that actually won the vote. This unnecessary and expensive retreat especially felt like a slap in the face to those who had long been denied well-deserved raises. * Because the CPO has no experience relevant to the operation of a company such as Couchsurfing, she needs to enforce massive amounts of "process" (think meetings and useless documentation) so that she understands what the actual contributors have done. If she doesn't understand something, she kills it, even if contributors strongly feel it is a necessary improvement. * The CPO has undue influence in the hiring processes and decisions of all other teams, despite having no experience that would inform her meaningfully as to the needs of those teams * The site's design desperately needs an update, but there are no signs of it changing any time soon because design just isn't prioritized or well-utilized (through absolutely no fault of the designers themselves) * Morale is awful and multiple key employees have left recently, including almost the entire web team. As mentioned earlier, the C-trio plans to replace these contributors with more managers/owners. It seems certain that more employees will leave soon, including some of the most important remaining contributors. * The office in San Francisco has especially miserable morale because the office manager (who is also, strangely, acting CTO?) won't let people keep anything on their desk, including family photos, and the C-trio have posted demeaning and sarcastic memes around the office to shame people for their behaviors * The COO, who also handles HR, makes employees feel uncomfortable and afraid. It's very clear from his behavior that he explicitly views his role as a servant of the CEO and not a protector of the employees. Because this problem exists directly on the C-trio team, none of the problems that I've mentioned can be addressed. Former employees have also told several very believable stories about sexual misdeeds throughout the company's history. Beware.