Hummingbird (CA) Reviews

Hummingbird was a fantastic place to work until it wasn't. I was drawn to the company from my first visit to their website and truly believed in their goal of curbing money laundering and the crime associated with it. Onboarding was some of the best I've ever experienced, and my manager took the time to ensure I was learning the industry and recommended employees I should speak with to gain a better understanding of the product. They were genuinely invested in my success at the company, for which I'm still grateful today. My only initial complaint was that my salary was definitely way too low for both the experience they were looking for and my own experience, and Hummingbird doesn't negotiate salaries. But because I believed in the company, I was willing to take a lesser salary than my previous role's to contribute to their goal. Unfortunately, "too good to be true" wound up being the story of my time here. My initial discontent began when I was put on a project and then almost immediately removed from it to do other, frankly lesser, work. And then that's primarily what I was doing, week after week. I mentioned this to my manager, who insisted it was work we really needed to get done, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was removed from the project for reasons that weren't being disclosed to me. I also felt like my skill set wasn't being properly utilized and the breadth of experience I was so excited to have came to a halt. Then I became aware that firings were suddenly (and very quietly) happening, first on other teams and then on mine. People who I'd just seen weeks before at our first major company event were suddenly no longer with the company; given how small Hummingbird was and is, the lack of wider communication was concerning. Our team lead became absolutely obsessed with AI and kept grilling all of the sub-teams about how they planned on implementing it in their day-to-day work. I'm not interested in ushering in my own obsolescence, so I was hesitant to say I was planning on using it at all, but found a small-but-useful way to incorporate it into my work. However, I did express concern about leaning too heavily on it and did say that I wasn't thrilled at all about using it, especially given how easily I could be replaced by it. As another person mentioned, Hummingbird's politics leaned pretty heavily left and leadership, middle management, and some ICs didn't shy from sharing these views on Slack, in person, or at company events. While this isn't unique to Hummingbird, it's exhausting and was one of the worst aspects of this company. I absolutely didn't feel comfortable openly opposing these views, and the DEI struggle session we were all subjected to at the company offsite was eye-opening and shocking in the worst way. White, female employees would make openly hostile, racist, misandrist comments in the private women's Slack channel that, if they were said about any other group that wasn't white or male, would never fly and would be grounds for punishment or termination. Members of HR were part of this group; I never saw them discouraging those comments or asking that they be removed, at least not publicly. The day I was added to the channel was the day I left it (despite another employee attempting to add me back to it at least one more time). My photo was used without my permission in a Women's Day collage that the company posted to LinkedIn, which I resented not only because I wasn't asked for use of my own photo, but because I stay away from all identity politics at work. An email was sent out to female employees asking for volunteers to write a short reply to a Women's Day prompt; I deliberately didn't reply, so it should've been clear between that and leaving the Slack channel that I wanted no part of the identity politics. It was starting to feel like certain people at the company wanted women and minorities to fit into certain boxes and parrot only certain views, and the incessant clubbing over the head of the company's preferred politics was insufferable. The cracks started to show pretty quickly at Hummingbird, from the product itself to leadership. I began to have suspicions that everything was not as rosy as it seemed, based on some things I observed internally during the course of my work. There were also a couple of leads in particular who were so difficult or nasty to work with that they were holding up major projects, which I'd sometimes get roped into and which died in the water, wasting large chunks of my time and effort. The Customer Success team was put on such a high pedestal that they were allowed to implement a ridiculous, tedious process to not just request their assistance on projects, but to even get time to speak with them. A company as small as Hummingbird should NOT allow teams to gate keep their time and make themselves inaccessible without first going through their multistep "fill out a form and tell us why you need to speak with us or need our help" process. Completely antithetical to the structure of a startup and felt extremely elitist. Internally, absolutely everything was done in Notion, and it was awful. The platform has a steep learning curve and every team has that one person who's extremely particular about how they want the team's Notion hub to look, feel, and be organized. In response to the majority of the company saying they hated Notion and felt it was chaotic and confusing, HR tried to completely overhaul it, but it continued to be an overly complicated mess. Eventually, everything came to an end when I woke up one morning to a handful of emails in my personal email inbox informing me that 15% of the company, including myself, had been laid off. Despite my suspicions that something like this may have been on the horizon, no warnings were ever communicated to the company that layoffs were a possibility. This came as a total shock. I went through a THREE-MONTH interview process for this role (in large part because of poor timing and communication between HR and the hiring managers), so to be laid off less than a year into my tenure here was pretty angering, to say the least. I did a lot of great work in my time here, even if I didn't get to do everything I wanted to do, and I contributed significantly to getting major projects in motion before the layoffs. There was a period of a month not too long after I started where I was holding down my team because the lead was out. So it felt especially lame to then have the company turn around and let me go after everything I'd done. I wish Hummingbird well because money laundering and the crimes associated with it absolutely need to be addressed. But there's some internal housecleaning that needs to be done to ensure that personal politics are left at the door at the start of every workday, that leads are better trained, and that transparency where possible is implemented.