If you can’t trust somebody, don’t hire him!

Broken

 

I started working at this company as an Applied data science engineer. I was very excited to build that brand new content analysis platform that the CEO described for me in the first interview with him and one of my friends who was applying for the same title. In the first few months, we did so much of what we’ve promised. We had 5 Deep learning models in production, Fully functional near real-time data pipeline, search engine, and a visualization platform. From the business side, we had around 8 potential big clients. The culture wasn’t bad. We were in good shape.

 

Micromanaging, trust-issues and undermining.

The CEO ignored our advice to hire someone as a product guy. And because the product team isn’t just a bunch of guys who choose the next features. He started to micromanage the team. He wanted to understand every line of code in our codebase. He once spent more than 2 hours with one of the teams forcing him to explain how elastic search indexing works and why choose elastic over mongo.

He had problems trusting other’s decisions. From stack choice to features implementation, to even DevOps. You either have a killer point which cuts all debates and proves your point or we will go with his “way of doing things”. Simply, he couldn’t trust the people’s he hired. I remember a huge argument between me and him about why we needed more disk space on the dev servers.

Every successful person tends to like working with better people than himself. That’s how you learn and grow. Everyone I worked with at this company had an undermining problem at the company. Every argument with the CEO ended with him mentioning his X years of experience and how 3 or 4 years of experience doesn’t make you qualified to take ANY decision.

 

4 months ago, the CEO shat down the company. It was pretty depressing because the company was very close to achieve success. But if you can’t believe in the people you hired, Why should anyone believe in your company?