Out of touch leaders with super-deep reporting lines. Unfortunately, for an infrastructure engineering company, we lack infrastructure engineering leaders, and it's showing through in our product.

Leadership that shows up to work.

Getting paid and going home.

Actually try to do something themselves before crying helplessness and seeking help.

Leadership that actually shows up, engages with the work, and meaningfully engages in critical discussion from the employee base. I feel more like a serf than a business partner.

Connect with rank-and-file employees. Have an open, anonymous Q&A at all-hands. The ways the leaders speak about Crusoe makes me convinced they have no idea what is actually going on inside their company.

There isn't one? It's just very average and only just covers the cost of living. I'm not really amazed by it and can't take vacations or do fun stuff, but I like staying housed.

Being leveled appropriately, relative to my peers: demoting or offboarding dead weight non-performers, and promoting and platforming those that are making a positive impact. Being treated as an adult that can get my work done, regardless of how that happens.

Talking and connecting with people outside of the executive leadership teams. The leadership team only spends time with other leaders. Listen to, and meaningfully integrate the perspectives and views of the VP/Director-level leaders. Exec Leadership is off doing their own thing without us.

Deep layers of middle-management leads to extreme disconnection between leadership and execution. A culture of carelessness leads to excessive mistakes and crappy work. When there is no reward for craftsmanship, and no punishment for being lazy, folks just check out and do the bare minimum.

Treat employees like adults: - Let them set their own collaboration models and locations - Set clear expectations - Reward folks when they exceed expectations, and meaningfully discipline folks when they fail. There is currently no punishment for failing, so folks just checked out.

Care about the work and doing a good job. Practice humility. We have a huge contingent of employees that are here because they like the paycheck, but it really hurts those of us that care about doing a high-quality job. With management that doesn't know how to code, we're shipping crappy software.

Showing up to do the work with us. It feels like our leadership is totally checked out, and is more invested in photo shoots than actually doing the work of building a company. Having a complete in-office mandate only coming from people with private offices is totally ableist and tone-deaf.

Be intellectually engaged! Think through your problems and don't just copy-paste stuff from LLMs back at us -- it's deeply disrespectful to show up to present ideas and concepts that folks can't even reason about. Level up by digging into the lower layers. Learn how DNS works!