Small Company CEO mischief (Beware of the small company CEO)

In my nearly 20-year software career, I have worked in many, many companies with diverse corporate cultures, variable number of employees (from 20 employees to 125,000+ employees), and differing expectations of their employees.

The 2 most memorable experiences of corporate culture that I have are from the smallest companies that I have worked for in my career. One company had around 20 employees, and the other around 30.

The CEO of each company directed the entire corporate culture of each company. I guess it must be that way in most small companies.

In my case, I have worked for 2 small companies with CEO's who had extremely different philosophies on personal work ethic, productivity expectations of themselves and their employees.

In my first small company experience, the CEO was a 9-to-5'er, never worked weekends, never came out of his office except to play occasional foosball, and never held his executives accountable for missing sales goals, missing talent on HR hiring, and missing marketing goals. The only reason that our engineering team made our product development goals is that we actually had a VP of engineering who drove us to excel and produce, and whom we liked and trusted. And we were passionate about delivering cutting-edge technology.

But the CEO never worked extra hours, never shared the vision of the company with us, never was a leader, never seemed to care that much about the success of the company. Although the employees of the company liked working there and it was indeed a fun and challenging place to work (technology-wise), there were no clear goals and the company could never really learn to sell it's innovative product, and there was no accountability amongst the executives to meet their team's goals, if there ever even were goals identified. Even though it was technically a start-up company, most employees (other than the engineering team) worked normal work hours and produced very little.

Not coincidentally, that company went out of business within 3 years, and that's only because it lasted longer than normal because it was started in the dot-com boom in the late 1990's.

Fast forward a few years ahead.

I was working at a company that was doing better financially with less employees, but the CEO of the company had such incredibly high goals (and at most times, unrealistic) for himself and his employees. This CEO often slept afternoons and sometimes evenings at work, but overall working 20+ hour days through the day and night, and expected 50+ hours or more from his employees, it was even written in the employment contract. The corporate culture was based on production only, and hinted of HR action if employee goals were not met. It was the ultimate in pay-for-performance compensation. Produce and be rewarded with your job, miss whatever expectations there are and you are gone quickly.

Since I am naturally an accountable person and expect other employees to be accountable for their actions and performance, I was cool with this.

Initially, it was great to work for a CEO that lead by example and worked crazy hours, had incredible attention to detail, and seemed to completely understand every single minute detail of his business. He demanded a micro-understanding of every single detail that occurred at his business, regardless of his competency to really understand if these events were good or bad for his company.

Employees at this company worked scared because they knew if they made perceived mistakes, they would soon be laid-off or fired. I was the 4th architect hired at the company in less than one year, each successive architect before me lasted a mere 3 months. 3 other high-ranking employees quit the company in the first 2 months that I was there. I very quickly realized that I was in trouble. No matter what I did, it seemed this CEO, who made all hiring/firing decisions (actually any company decision on business or whatever) would eventually impose unbeknownst and unrealistic expectations on me, which very soon came to fruition.

I produced a great architecture and delivered it to the company and my employment ended after 7 months because I realized what everyone else before me had been through: you can't please someone who is not pleased with themselves and imposes their expectations, often unrealitic and unattainable, on you and the rest of the team. Oh and he made me accountable for tasks that had never, ever, had agreed about in the job summary during the job interviews. This CEO expected you to be the greatest things since sliced bread at whatever task he needed done.

Looking back on both of these job experiences, I realized that although you can do your absolute best to ask questions during the job interview to try to understand the company's expectations of you and the tasks that you will be responsible at the job, you are always taking a chance regardless. My best advice is to ask yourself: Do I trust this person? Do I trust the company? Do I trust what they are telling me about the company and why it is such a desirable job for me?

My point to you is this: be careful during your job interview to identify and be acutely aware of red flags when learning about excessive employee turnover or lack of executive accountability, because both will cause the company, and ultimately your career goals, to fail. And for no reason of your own. And acutely understand what their expectations of you are and get it in writing.

And if it's a small company, try to understand the phsyche of the CEO as much as possible. If he's a nutjob like the 2 in my examples were, then steer clear of the company; it's in your best interest.