Started a new job recently. Going to make some predictions and try to keep track of how things go. I've meant to do this with past jobs, but got too complacent. These predictions are made after a month at the job.
The company has enough money for at least two years of development, but is already actively perusing very big contracts early in the development cycle, requiring engineers to put in exceptional amounts of work/hours in order to meet promises. They should have taken the time to produce a reasonably stable quality project before pursuing such high value targets.
CEO I was warned before hand that they were either a fraud (due to fraudulent behavior in the past in discussing with previous coworkers), or a bungling fool. They're proving to be a fool. Sells features that aren't implemented, pushes the team hard to work exceptional hours to meet those promises.
COO good personality, but not doing their assigned job and not turning the environment from a fraternatory (frat-house drug lab) into an actual professional laboratory. Should vacate the position to be filled by someone with the intent on fulfilling the duties of the position and take another position more in line with what they want to achieve within the company.
Both CEO and COO have exhibited outright cowardice in certain situations, which could indicate that they will not stand up for the company and instead denigrate the engineering team in order to attempt to save face/appease upset customers as to issues encountered with missing features or bugs. Both are clearly taking advantage of a significant portion of the extremely young work force (two key employees are 20 years old) with ego manipulation and appealing to their delusions of grandeur in lieu of a reasonable salary.
CTO exceptionally good in the field in question as well as software development. Has developed very high quality code and made very large improvements to the overall working of the system, but unable to handle criticism or comments. Has repeatedly behaved exceptionally unprofessionally (out right childishly) in response to derision of how they feel testing should be done, released code and manhandled temporary configurations in detrimental ways moments before a production system was to go live, and threw out right fits when the same level of pedantry was applied to their PR's as they apply to their employee PR's (such as pep8'ing other engineers code).
Overall the engineering team is exceptional, producing incredible amounts of very good code and remarkable improvements to the product. Will the draw backs of the C-levels outweigh the quality of the dev team and the early-to-market advantage they have over other similar companies? Hopefully I'll be around long enough to find out personally.
