Gut check this for me - toxic or not?
I moved to a startup fairly recently as an engineering manager, leaving a stable job to do it. During interviews I did my diligence — asked about leadership, product, culture, remote setup — and it read as a good fit with a boss I'd want to work for.
Since starting, a few things haven't matched what I was told. The remote policy is changing, and the product area I was hired to run wasn't as real as it sounded.
But the bigger issue is cultural. There's a persistent lack of trust in the engineers. Communication from the top is thin. Strong, experienced teams get overruled on technical decisions with regularity. And effectively no one below the exec level owns a decision — people make a safe call, then route it upward for approval, so there's constant churn and rework.
The part that really shifted my read: a major product direction was set unilaterally at the top, with essentially no engineering involvement, and it's being celebrated by the business. I get why from a business angle — but the teams now have no clear sense of what role they play. And the execution quality coming out of that process is rough: little to no testing, shortcuts everywhere, no real engineering discipline, and things break constantly as a result.
When I raised career growth with my manager, the implication I took away was that it's contingent on nights and weekends.
The throughline is that the engineering leadership and culture-building I was hired for don't actually seem wanted. There's little appetite for building sustainable process or a real engineering org. I feel less like a leader and more like a senior IC who also writes performance reviews.
Is this just normal startup stuff, or did I misjudge this?
Anonymized with Claude, my apologies for clanker words.