Pulley reviews

-CEO is needlessly intimidating, no one will challenge her, she may talk fast and she is convinced she is always right about 99% of the time. She knows the current environment so very few will speak up and challenge. Even if it holds back the teams. She clearly lacks trust to delegate and let others lead. That approach may work for a small early company, but not for a high growth startup. -Teammates seem to replace each other all the time. A new hire to work alongside you in the team (even in a different focus) likely means you'll compete for favor then the loser gets cut/let-go. -CEO ruthlessly picks favorites fast (just like other reviews state). She'll respond to these employees fast, give thoughtful responses, etc. Everyone else? Not so much. -I watched dozens of my colleagues get let go in two waves, it was not acknowledge the first time, it was barely acknowledged the second. Most of these people were coming up on 1-year or had their first vacations coming up. So be careful about using PTO or if you're nearing 1-2 year marks. -Direction is changing all the time, there is a core product that is growing pretty well, but lots of tone of uncertainty and thin ice with this company. A priority 1 new hire from a few months ago might get cut a few months later. -I got to peer interview some candidates at companies that were growing at 10x-15x the rate of Pulley, we'd still decline them. They were more capable than me, but probably more expensive. Instead, I got to take on more work.

- Despite having opinions about the leadership, I’ve attempted to focus on non-subjective facts in this review. - Please note that most of the recent positive reviews from Spring 2025 are from employees who recently joined the company and have only been their 2-3 months, and who were encouraged by leadership and HR to post those reviews. - Leadership frequently prioritized hiring for future capacity, despite underutilizing current staff. - Leadership churned 6 senior designers since October 2023. Two designers had such a bad experience they completely omitted Pulley from their résumés. - Leadership churned 5 product managers since 2023. - Churned more than a dozen software engineers and engineering leaders since 2023. - Scaled the engineering team in 2024, promoted a head of engineering, a software architect, and senior engineering manager, then laid them off a couple months later (part of the October 2024 layoffs due to "new strategy"). - Announced a new vision at a team offsite, then demonstrated no progress toward that vision over the next 6 months. Laid off 20% of the company a week later, including a few new hires that had not yet had their first official day. - The October layoffs are impacting the moral of newly hired engineers, who question the logic of the layoffs, and who find it hypocritical to be hiring for the same roles for the people who were laid off. - Pulley generally cannot ship. Most projects get canceled or significantly descoped. The same projects have been recycled for 3 years running. - Leadership has a pattern of asking newly hired senior employees to come up with a North Star vision. - Rallied the team around “Founder Mode” after Paul Graham’s essay made a splash, then never spoke about it about it again. - During performance review cycles, some employees would achieve an “exceeds expectations” rating and receive neither promotion nor compensation adjustment. Some employees were promoted in title only with no compensation adjustment. - There are no leveling frameworks (except for perhaps Engineering—before the Head of Engineering was laid off), so feedback about performing “under/at/above level” is subjective. - Leadership took several months to recruit an User Research contractor to conduct customer discovery research as an effort to identify new strategic opportunities. Members of the PDE org were excluded from the process, and leadership never shared the research findings with the broader team. - On multiple occasions, the COO disappeared for 4 weeks at a time, with no communication at all to the broader team, which lead to confusion and rumors each time.