Interaction Design Foundation reviews

My mental health has been absolute trash while I've worked here. I definitely should have not accepted this position. I feel bullied, and humiliated and I'm always anxious. I'm staying because I have a family that I support but I wish I could just leave. IxDF is absolute trash. The CEO is mean and erratic and he has a trusted sidekick who is like the devil's pawn. If you're looking at the jobs advertised or watching that nonsense video they have on the careers page thinking that this is such a great place, you're super super wrong. Please consider all other jobs before you come to work for IxDF. Please........I feel trapped and so do so many other employees. You do not want to be in this position. You will be gaslighted, manipulated, bullied, and made to feel that you're not a good fit. I can't believe I went through that many rounds of interviews just to land in such a toxic environment. This is definitely the worst I have ever experienced hands down!

I deliberated for a long time whether to write this review. Firstly, I currently work at IxDF, but I have put a different location and job title to the one I actually have. This is because I, like many of us, am afraid to truly voice my opinion. IxDF claims to have a culture of constructive criticism, but the reality is that the founders can only take some constructive criticism on good days for simple things, and it's a gamble that few can afford to take. Secondly, I am writing this as I am exhausted at all the periods of instability, petty drama, and lack of real movement of our product. Since I have been here, there seems to be a vicious cycle: founders get excited about someone/something --> force everyone to drop what they are doing and work on that thing (that is often not backed by user research, ironically) --> thing fails/stalls --> founders scapegoat 1-2 people and treat them terribly and/or fire them under horrendous conditions --> founders have "post-cleanse" high where they regain energy, assure everyone that the poison is removed, hyper-fixate on new thing for the company --> cycle repeats. So I have a proposition: at the moment, working here is a 2/5. If IxDF goes 3 months without any severe drama, I will update my review to 3/5. If it goes 6 months with no severe drama (obviously I understand some things are out of the founders' hands, I'll give grace to anything that is genuinely not their fault, but most is) and 3 features launched from the backlogged list of features, I'll update my score to 5/5. I would be excited to see the founders rise to the occasion, not start a manhunt to find who wrote this, and to get to work, as well as allow the rest of us to work in an environment not full of stupid interruptions. I love the actual work when I can do it properly.