Incompetence, sexism, and greed - Software Engineer Boundless Immigration Employee Review

Boundless claims to be driven by its "immigrants first" tenet, but that was never reflected in my day-to-day. I have documented situations where employees were forced to lie to customers by their supervisor, including one where we accused UPS of misplacing a customer's entire application package, knowing that we had in fact not shipped it yet. When I left, our systems were riddled with security and privacy problems. For example, Boundless never deletes documents that users upload to our servers — yes, this means that if you uploaded copies of your social security card, passport, or bank statements, they will live on indefinitely. Every employee with access to our internal tools can view every single bit of information about any customer in our system — including our customers' children. There is no policy in place to protect the data of people whose relationships end if they're not the account holder, which is a vector for abuse. In the middle of 2020, we hired a bunch of fixed-term employees and gave them access to private, sensitive information about our customers, with no vetting or background checks of any kind. Boundless uses their "mission" to coerce employees into working overtime and accepting low salaries. They prey on young people by telling them they'll "make a difference" and then pay them very little for a ridiculous amount of work. It's completely unfair for some folks to earn $40k/year and have to work 60h/week, while the engineers get paid more than $130k/year to work a cool 30 hours. At the end of the day, the fact that Boundless's CEO would like nothing more than to work with DHS and ICE says all you need to know about the company's mission. Boundless is a young company that suffers from the inefficiencies of a major corporation. C-levels and VPs dictate implementation decisions, even though they are not individual contributors. Boundless has wasted a massive sum of money by forcing designers and engineers to submit to the whims of managers who had a "vision" for how things should work and forced impractical decisions. When engineers were given the freedom to work together and come up with solutions, the results were marvelous and morale went up, but those times were rare. Hiring decisions are extremely problematic. There were interview loops where the entire engineering team down-voted candidates, but when those candidates were white men or happened to have invested money in the company, the CTO decided to hire them anyway. As a direct result of this, every single software engineer that worked at Boundless in early 2020 has now left the company. The culture is deeply sexist. My female colleagues were called "non-collaborative" or "hard to work with" when they expressed important concerns. Women were only asked to attend the interviews of female candidates. Women were not given the recognition they deserved, even though their work was of higher quality than their male colleagues. Women were expected to perform an obscene amount of emotional labor, documentation, and "glue work." And through all that, the only times female engineers were promoted were after they gave their notice. When the engineering team pushed for diversity in the recruitment process, we were told that hiring diverse folks was the equivalent of "widening the goalposts". In other words, white men in charge of recruiting engineers are convinced that if you're not a white dude, you're automatically less competent. In February 2021, the company's leadership decided to lay off a bunch of employees. Some were terminated right away, while others were offered the "option" to relocate to Boundless's Las Vegas office. The catch: salaries would be cut by up to 36%, people would have to move to Nevada during an ongoing pandemic, and they would have to work in a physical office with documented Covid outbreaks. Meanwhile, the leadership team isn't taking any pay cuts, relocating, or facing any consequences.