Neat startup flails and fails - Senior Software Engineer CultureAI Employee Review

Reviews on Glassdoor are asked for internally to promote hiring, and are severely outdated. Advertised startup benefits such as frequent socials, team nights and friendly culture all faded away a year ago. Often the C-Suite will suggest a "pizza hackathon", when what they mean is working evenings and weekends until a client promise is delivered. Rounds of redundancy and guarded secret sackings have increased pressure on those left, with no relief through changing business strategies. Recent engineering management changes have removed remaining culture and cohesion from its teams. Team members have been crying on calls the new management, because of stress directly caused by their decisions, yet decision making is changed. We were treated as tools, and they responded robotically. Salary stagnation once hired, new hires often paid more than existing salaries, initial salary entirely down to negotiating ability not technical capability. C-Suite vibe coding products and offshoring future engineering hires to the Philippines creates more problems which the existing engineers must deal with, and represents an obvious plan to reduce staff further. Loyalty is expected but not returned. Weekends and overtime worked are quickly forgotten when it comes to salary and working condition negotiations. Business mantra is to neglect existing customers until the moment they threaten to leave, and lie to new ones until they join. These serve to increase pressure on engineering, who deal with the last minute demands of both. Consistent bad financial decisions from the top have drained company finances needlessly; multiple large empty offices fully kitted out in unused expensive equipment, frequent company wide meetups for announcements, poorly planned marketing spending and C-Suite "offsite" get togethers being a few. No responsibility has been accepted for this. Rotating upper management has resulted in continued direction shift and further financial waste.