Went from good to toxic - Software Engineer Remote Employee Review

During the last 3 years this company went from a cool fast growing startup, boasting allowing to work from anywhere, kindness as a value, interesting work, lots of agency to one of the worst places I have ever worked. - Extremely toxic leadership. This comes from the top, co-founders are rude, disrespectful and often create very stressful hostile work environment. They dress it up as a "performance culture" and let us know that if we do not like it - we can be easily replaced. - Career advancement is borderline impossible. The only way to get promoted is to have a manager and, more importantly, director above you who have a lot of sway to push you through. It is routinely observed that promotions are not merit based but nepotism based. Even if you direct manager wants to give you a good performance review, you can be demoted by leadership because they think too many people cannot perform well. This depresses the salary adjustments which do not even reach the level of inflation in most cases. - Benefits are very basic and not great. Do not believe what you see in job descriptions. Flexible time off means limited time off, it is still okay but it is not unlimited. "Work from anywhere" benefit is not exactly true, they do not like to hire in USA due to costs and if you want to move while employed to a more expensive region, they will not move you and you will have to quit the job. USA Health/Medical benefits are very bad and very expensive. - Silent layoffs. Company has been doing a lot of silent layoffs, firing people for reasons only known to them and then not addressing it at all. One day you wake up and your colleague is no longer there, with no explanation or message. It is very distressing and obscure, it has chilling effect on company culture where nobody is talking openly and everybody is talking in DMs or side chats. There is no trust between employees and leadership. It is hard to overstate how different this company is from what it was 3 years ago. From a fun, high velocity, high agency and free spirited environment to a corporate drone culture, check-in-check-out workday, leadership sharing fake motivational messages and sycophants celebrating it. I would choose any other company to work for.