Pros
- There are smart and talented people that work at Pulley (and it's unfortunate that leadership cannot find a way to get everybody moving in the same direction) - Because of the confusion in strategy and execution, it's possible you'll have time to deep dive on AI and other emerging technologies if you're hungry for professional development.
Cons
- 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.