Pros
- At the individual contributor level, many people are competent, helpful, and good team players. Unfortunately, that teamwork often seems to come from people trying to survive difficult conditions together rather than from a genuinely motivating culture. - Learning is encouraged in theory, and there are people who care about professional growth. In practice, however, learning often has to happen on your own time and at your own expense. - Informal feedback is frequent, but it is often negative, poorly delivered, or condescending. Formal performance reviews appear to be absent or inconsistent.
Cons
Where do I begin ... - The company feels exhausted from the inside. On my first day in the office, I was struck by the visible discouragement on people’s faces. Later, I understood exactly why. - For a company that has existed for almost 20 years, Evolving Web operates with the instability of a first-year startup. The slightest change triggers panic, endless leadership touchpoints, and circular discussions that waste time without producing clear decisions. After all that, employees are left alone to deal with the consequences and are often positioned as scapegoats if things go wrong. - Leadership is reactive, immature, and inconsistent. Decisions are based on hunches, personal opinions, and sudden impulses rather than data, KPIs, or coherent strategy. Project direction changes abruptly, plans are unclear, and PMs are expected to absorb the impact while later being blamed when projects go off track. - The owner’s priorities are very clear: protect profit, minimize risk to the business, and treat people as disposable capacity. There is a lot of talk about setting employees up for success, but the actual experience is closer to being set up to take the blame. When real support or timely decisions are needed, leadership involvement often creates more disruption rather than less. - Resource planning is completely detached from reality. By the time the company realizes it needs to hire one person, it usually already needs several. Over-allocation is the norm, with people expected to function at 120% to 150% capacity while still delivering as if this were sustainable. Combine that with underestimated projects, constant resource shuffling, and weak planning, and it is almost surprising when anything finishes on time or on budget. When it doesn’t, the blame lands downward. - The company’s operational systems are outdated and inefficient. Internally, it feels stuck in a spreadsheet-era mindset. That seems to reflect the PMO's mindset who is probably the biggest micromanger. Tools are fragmented, centralized systems are lacking, KPIs are absent, and employees are expected to manually keep multiple disconnected systems aligned. A significant amount of time is wasted compensating for poor infrastructure. - Micromanagement is not an occasional issue here. It is the management model. A large amount of project time is consumed by leadership touchpoints, status checks, and vague review meetings where expectations are unclear until after the fact. Employees are not told exactly what is needed, then criticized for not producing it. Every minute is tracked, and if the time logging is not done exactly as expected, pay can be affected. - The company claims to care about risk, but its risk management is backwards. It is extremely cautious about hiring and trusting people, yet routinely creates huge project risk through understaffing, over-allocation, delayed decisions, and resource shuffling. In my experience, most serious project risks were caused internally by management decisions, not by clients, market conditions, or external unknowns. - The culture is blame-heavy and trust-poor. Risk and decision-making are pushed upward, but accountability is pushed downward. Leadership decisions often arrive late, after the moment when they would have helped, and then disrupt work that teams have already struggled to stabilize. - There is no real job security. I saw people hired and laid off within the same week because leadership suddenly decided future allocation might not be high enough. Employees are treated as expendable, and that message is not subtle. Growth opportunities are extremely limited, and the most realistic way to get a meaningful salary increase is to leave the company. - Work-life balance is also poor. A 40-hour workweek does not necessarily mean a humane workload, especially when lunch is on top of that and event preparation may be expected on personal time. The hybrid model requires at least three days in the office, but the office setup is cramped and poorly suited for frequent online meetings. Finding a private room or booth for calls is often unreliable. - I also remember my last day at the office and the huge sense of relief when I left it that day knowing that I will never come back.
