A Note About Our Employee Reviews

You’ll find some difficult reviews there. I’m not going to pretend they don’t exist, dismiss everyone who wrote them as a disgruntled former employee, or pretend every criticism is wrong. Some of what’s written carries real weight, and I’ve had to own my part in that.

I didn’t always have the structure to support the company I was trying to build.

BTN didn’t start with a playbook. We’re not running the version of a company that already had twenty years of management practice worked out before I hired my first person. We’re trying to build a specific kind of company, one where people develop real judgment instead of just following instructions, and there was no template for that sitting on a shelf. I had to build the structure while the company was already running, which means for a long time, some of that structure simply didn’t exist yet.

That’s context, not an excuse. Some of what shows up in these reviews is real, and it happened because I hadn’t built the systems to prevent it yet. Pay and expectations that weren’t clearly benchmarked. Autonomy handed to people before they’d been taught how to use it. Feedback that landed as criticism instead of coaching because there wasn’t a structure underneath it yet. Terminations that were handled clumsily, without the clarity or process people deserved. I’ve made real mistakes running this company, and I’d rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

What I know now that I didn’t always know: people don’t walk in already understanding the kind of company I’m trying to build. Concepts like self-leadership, judgment over instruction, and autonomy paired with responsibility aren’t things most workplaces teach, so it’s not reasonable to expect people to just arrive knowing them. If I expect a different way of working, it’s on me to actually teach it, not just expect it. Every one of the changes below exists because I learned that the hard way.

What’s actually changed

Here’s what’s real, not just promised:

Autonomy without structure can feel a lot like being left on your own. One theme that shows up in some of our reviews is essentially: I was told to figure things out myself, but then I was criticized when I got it wrong. I can understand how someone could have experienced BTN that way. My intention was to develop independent thinkers, not people waiting for instructions, but intention isn’t enough. If we want someone to become independent, we have to teach them how to get there.

That’s why we built the Thinking Loop, our framework for anticipating, executing, and validating your own work, and why we now teach a deliberate progression instead of assuming it: watch me, we do it together, you do it, you own it. Someone learning a skill shouldn’t be held to the same standard of independence as someone who’s already demonstrated mastery of it. That’s obvious to me now. It wasn’t always reflected clearly enough in how BTN operated.

We built a competency model and a knowledge hub instead of “figure it out.” Roles at BTN are mapped against Operator, Builder, and Engineer levels, and what it means to operate at each level as a Technologist. Our internal knowledge base is built around worked examples (here’s how someone actually thought through a problem like this) instead of static documentation nobody reads. The goal is to actually transfer judgment, not just hand someone a task and see what happens.

Personal responsibility runs both directions here. We expect people to communicate when something’s going wrong instead of letting it quietly get bigger, to recognize when they’re stuck, and to escalate intelligently rather than spend three hours repeating an approach that isn’t working. We train on what that actually looks like now, not just expect it.

But that expectation only holds if we’re willing to ask the same question of ourselves. Someone can genuinely need to improve, and also have been handed unclear instructions or insufficient training. Someone can make a mistake, and the system we designed can have made that mistake more likely. We built a process that flags drop-offs and looks for the root cause instead of simply deciding whose fault something was, because “I have too much work” and “this work is taking far longer than it should” are different problems that need different fixes. We don’t think it’s fair to treat every gap as a personal failing until we’ve ruled out our own.

We built an actual workload circuit breaker. For a while, “I have too much work” could mean three very different things: not enough hours for the work that was assigned, not enough skill yet to do some of it efficiently, or a genuinely fixable pattern of working ineffectively, and all three were landing the same way. That’s not fair to the person raising it or to the company trying to respond to it. The circuit breaker isn’t “someone feels overloaded, so management removes work.” It’s “we’ve hit a point where continuing this way stops being productive, so we stop and diagnose why,” with clear thresholds for when to reassess and escalate instead of quietly grinding for hours. Nobody has to guess where “too long” starts anymore, and neither do we.

We named the three versions of management we’ve actually practiced, in public, on our site. Micromanagement, compliance management, and what we’re building toward, Expansion Management, where the point of a manager is to make you more capable, not to check that you’re compliant. We wrote that down and published it because I’d rather be held to it than quietly hope people notice.

Where I think some of this comes down to fit, not failure

Some of what’s in these reviews, I think, is less about something we got wrong and more about two different ideas of what work should be. BTN is deliberately not built around clearly bounded tasks, a manager who sets your priorities, and predictable, fully-defined execution. We’re building toward something that asks more of people earlier: judgment, self-management, comfort with ambiguity, and taking responsibility for surfacing problems instead of waiting to be asked. That’s a real trade, and it’s not the right trade for everyone, and it shouldn’t have to be.

I’d rather say that outright than let someone find it out the hard way six months in. If you want the full picture of what we’re actually building and why, including the places we’ve fallen short of our own standard, I wrote it all out here: The Kind of Company We’re Building. It’s long, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve written about this company. Some of the people who left bad reviews would read that page and still not want to work here, and that’s fine. Some might read it and realize the friction they felt was actually the thing I was asking for, just without enough support underneath it yet. That gap is on me, and it’s the one I’m actively closing.

A note on the personal comments

Some reviews go beyond criticizing BTN’s systems or my decisions and into judgments about my character. I don’t think that’s a fair or useful way to evaluate any of this, and I’m not going to litigate individual experiences here. I haven’t led perfectly, and there are things I’d handle differently today. But I’ve spent over a decade trying to build this company and a genuinely better way of working, and I’d rather be judged on whether it keeps getting better than have a handful of reviews define who I am.

Where this leaves things

I’m not going to claim this page fixes what already happened for the people who wrote those reviews. It doesn’t. What I can tell you is that I’ve read them, taken the real parts seriously, and can point to specific things that exist today because of that, not just words about it. I’d rather be judged on whether BTN keeps getting better than on whether I can write a review response that makes the old ones disappear.

We’re still building this, but more deliberately now. We collect regular feedback on workload, learning, and support instead of waiting for problems to reach leadership on their own. We’re building clearer paths so that increased capability shows up as increased responsibility and pay, not just more work. And we’re working to make expectations and performance conversations explicit enough that nobody has to guess where they stand. Self-management doesn’t mean never asking for help; recognizing when you’re stuck and escalating well is part of it, not the opposite of it.

None of that will ever be perfect. It’s significantly more intentional than it was when some of what’s in these reviews happened.

People don’t arrive already knowing self-leadership: how to recognize they’re spinning their wheels, how to escalate well, the difference between taking responsibility and accepting blame, how to anticipate consequences or validate their own work. Those are capabilities, not personality traits, which means they can be taught, practiced, coached, and rewarded. That’s the company we’re building now.

Not a company with no management, but one where management is designed into the way we work instead of depending on someone standing over another person making sure they do their job. Not a company where everyone magically knows what to do, but one designed to help people become increasingly capable of figuring out what to do. Not a company where the employee is responsible for everything, but one where the individual owns their contribution and the organization owns the environment it creates around them. And not a company that claims to have figured all of this out. We’re still learning. But we’re learning deliberately.

If that sounds like the kind of workplace you want to be part of, the fuller philosophy is at the link above. And if you’re considering joining us, I’d genuinely encourage you to read our employee reviews too, so you understand both where we’ve come from and where we’re trying to go before deciding if BTN is right for you.