The CEO of my company is a lunatic
I started a new job about two months ago at a small venture-funded data analytics company that mostly specializes in health information systems. I work as a technical writer on a project that deals with some fairly boring things (hospitalization reports) and some interesting things (machine learning techniques to extract a diagnosis from unstructured clinical notes.) It's not my dream job, but I generally like the people I work with and I found health informatics interesting enough.
So far, so good. I have very little interest in my career path, and consider jobs mostly an evil necessity. And this sort of position hits the sweet spot between pay and responsibility.
My biggest responsibility is to draft a monthly report. This should be a sweet gig. There are a lot of details but the document is no more than 15 pages with plenty of boilerplate--and no one is going to read any of it. The client has all but said that he doesn't care. It is, in the parlance of the consulting world, "shelfware." I could literally slip in passages from Anna Karenina and no one would know.
I just completed my second report. The process is invariably a nightmare. I generally send a draft to the project manager, who gives it a cursory glance because he understands the details less than I do. I then send it to the COO, who makes substantial but reasonable edits. I then send it to the CEO, who unfailingly responds with a blistering email about how awful the document is. He'll then work late into the night rewriting it. He'll then inform me that he didn't have time to fully review the document but that I should implement his initial feedback. Then two more rounds of edits, accompanied by emails of diminishing umbrage and disappointment.
He is undoubtedly a brilliant man. He has a PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University and spent his career bouncing between academia and venture capitalism. He is also a senior fellow at a think tank that employs many fancy people that you've probably heard of.
He is also a certifiable nut. At heart, he wants to be a writer. He has a kind of spastic energy that lends him a bit of nerd-charisma. He's also a social gadfly, hooked into the DC cocktail party circuit. Most of the contracts we get are due to buddy-buddy relationships.
The craziness of the CEO getting involved in editing a monthly progress report was perplexing, so yesterday I looked at the company's Glassdoor reviews, which was... interesting. Some samples:
The CEO is a Nutjob!... He has unrealistic goals of perfection and is ridiculous about the smallest things. the leadership team is decent, but no one can call the CEO out on his behavior its his way or the highway. You would be fine to work at Amida if you have zero contact with the CEO and that is virtually impossible when he is in EVERYTHING all the time. he has mommy issues so yes he has issues with women so beware!
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Cons: Narcissistic CEO...
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The talk about corporate values and what the company stands for is a sham: Excellence? If by that you mean the CEO micromanaging the margins on your Powerpoint slides.
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The entire company suffers under the weight of a mean and extremely incompetent CEO. Where do I even begin? He plays employees against each other, by gossiping (often blatant falsehoods), asking others what specific people think about him, and asking people he trusts to be his “allies” in trying to quell any sentiment against him. He lies to his employees about other employees (for example, chalking up mass exoduses of employees as his doing instead).
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Where to begin, the CEO is an egotistical control freak...
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Amida has hired some very young people. I wonder if the CEO thinks he can treat them however he wants...
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The CEO is an abusive megalomaniac whose incompetence drives away smart hardworking people at all levels. As you can clearly gather from the activity on this site, the company is constantly undergoing dysfunctional cycles of mass exodus...
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I can confirm what has been said. I witnessed multiple people, most of them women, made to cry or be publicly humiliate..
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..the CEO shouts at employees who commit the smallest error (like utilizing a comma wrong) and there is no space for mistake...
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The CEO is one of the worst people I've ever worked with. He is a mediocre talent, but thinks he is a brilliant person surrounded by lessers...
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By the time I decided to leave, I dreaded reading any email from the CEO and coming into work every day...
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There is absolutely no job security, regardless of how talented or accomplished you are. You can get fired for any reason at any time, and many people are after just a couple months...
Good lord.