Catastrophically Immature Leadership; High Turnover
Pros
- LGBTQ+ friendly - Minimal direct pressure to work outside business hours, unless it’s to work with a customer. That said, it's common for engineers to work evening/weekend hours without being explicitly asked to. - Unlimited PTO. - The company’s product is progressive and feel-good. You get to tell people you work on a product that materially advances gender inclusion! You get to believe this yourself as well, for awhile. - Reasonable benefits, for a startup. Textio covers health insurance premiums but doesn't match 401(k) contributions. - The office was chic, but it's now sub-let due to Covid. Any future physical space is likely to be equally stylish, have the usual free snacks, etc. - The rank-and-file employees are great. Textio had a halo in the press and in the employment market from 2016-2018. The product and culture don't live up to the hype, but the hype alone has attracted a collection of truly wonderful people who genuinely care about language and inclusion. There are many excellent and compassionate engineers. This was the best group of colleagues I've worked with so far. Unfortunately, these people are all quitting. Just under half of the engineering team has quit in the not-quite-one-year since layoffs happened in early spring 2020. That doesn't include engineering losses from the layoffs in spring 2020. If you are from an underrepresented group and considering working at Textio, find the people who share your background. Ask how long they've been there. Ask the hiring manager how many people with your background used to be on the team, but are no longer there. Textio is (and has been) bleeding their longtime employees, and their employees from underrepresented groups, even as they rush to hire fresh talent. Imagine what it takes to go through a job search and on-board to a new company while working remotely in a pandemic. About half (half!!) of the engineers chose to do this rather than continue working at Textio. If you're considering working here, you owe it to yourself to ask everyone in your loop about the talent drain and compare the answers you get.
Cons
- Storytelling is a core business strength, and a personal strength of both founders. Ensuring that the stories are fully true is not a priority. - Textio of 2016-2018 had a very strong employer brand, which it has failed to live up to. The current low morale and bleeding of employees is the natural result. - The product vision is fickle, and planning and go-to-market processes lack rigor. Textio stumbled on some early successes (2017 & earlier) based on their hype, but the more recent releases from 2018 onward have failed to achieve similar traction. Leadership continues to use ad-hoc structureless product planning rather than creating robust product roadmaps, clear go-to-market strategies, customer personas, etc. Product vision and roadmapping are woefully underdeveloped. A years-long lack of consistent, seasoned leadership in both the product and marketing groups has compounded this problem. - The company leadership is inexperienced and immature. This leads to all kinds of problems (details below). Engineering leadership lacks startup experience outside of Textio. This has resulted in ineffective planning at any scale in between "here's what we're doing this week" and "here is a 2-year vision document with no concrete commitments or timelines." It means Textio has re-invented their own versions of standard engineering practices (example: their squad-based project development which rests on a typical matrixed organization, but lacks sprints or any other structured way of agreeing on timelines/deadlines, and has no clear mechanism for matching engineers to work). Engineering also has a culture that treats even hints of disagreement as an affront to the hierarchy of management. Decisions made around HR and compensation continually undermine trust. Promises are made, then broken (example: in the wake of #BLM 2020 Textio promised to achieve pay transparency, but later diluted this promise down to the creation of standardized pay ranges for each role). Important deadlines are changed (example: annual compensation updates, always done in December, were pushed by several months into 2021). Policies disappear and/or are selectively applied (example: rules governing the proportion of people from under-represented groups within candidate pools). There is a career ladder to govern employee growth and promotions, but it's also possible to be promoted or moved laterally into roles not represented in the ladder (surprise!). Without a record of what the criteria for those promotions are, how can anyone have confidence that the criteria are equitably applied?
