I've been working at Unbabel for a long time as an engineer. I've seen it grow from a few dozens of employees to almost 200. I've never seen such a mess of a company and I'm afraid to work at a startup again.
In 2018, we saw the first signs: engineering was being forced into working overtime, developing products without specs and doing a lot of requirement guessing. This came about because the sales team was running the company at a very high level due to the incompetence of the rest of the C-level, two inexperienced programmers with heavy egos, incapable of stepping down and hiring more suitable people for their respective jobs. Our platform had big scalability bottlenecks (Python/Relational Mongo/Roll-your-own NLP) that were being hit by clients on a daily basis and plans for refactoring the architecture were repeatedly rejected. Then, in December, a lot of VP-level people left. HR, Ops, Finance, Engineering, all gone. All because good professionals were hired to bring process and structure to the company, while having any proposals put forth rejected and scrapped.
Then, in the midst of the mess caused by the lack of clear reporting or company vision, C-level decided to move everyone into product verticals, when there were not enough employees to fill all the newly created positions. Morale dropped because everyone felt they were being forced into changing teams and seats, but kept working on the same projects they were before, as there were no goals set for the new verticals. People were on their own, setting their own goals.
When the morale dropped and the watercooler conversations started, some people left, others were convinced to leave, others were convincing others to leave. Meanwhile, the yes-men in the ranks were being promoted. They were friends with the right people and the company needed more managers for the newly-formed teams.
In conclusion, Unbabel was a great idea very poorly implemented. I hope it's not too late to save the company now.
