I’ve worked here a while. He’s a bit aggressive about it but a lot of what he says is on point.

The relationship with Forbes has always been a weird one. The understanding I’ve had was the company was spun off from an effort that kind of started in Forbes but they didn’t really want to deal with themselves.

It was always an SEO driven content strategy but for a while we had a pretty sizable content apparatus. Really big editorial teams for each vertical, a bigger cultural emphasis on the quality of the content and more collaboration across teams. The editorial teams had a lot of voice in what got published and tried to respect that we were using the Forbes brand and what that meant when we made recommendations or wrote about something. The only thing I’ll say to our (meagre) defense is there are panels of experts that are consulted for recommendations on a lot of products, and the teams that do research for the actual written content (not the affiliate/partner garbage that often takes up sponsored slots) do try and work hard to provide data to meet the demands of the SEO and BD teams.

A lot of that has changed over the years. The company has grown explosively in the time that I have been here. The company something like tripled its size last year alone. I went from being a newbie on a team of less than ten to a senior member on a team in the mid double digits in the space of a year. The culture has become increasingly bureaucratic and disconnected. We’ve always been a fully remote team but it used to be much more collaborative and cross-functional.

We don’t hear much at all from leadership. It’s always been a fairly insulated operation from one vertical layer to the other. There have been two pretty big layoffs this year which came out of the blue. Editorial teams have been gutted across every vertical and the strategy has pivoted more and more towards shovelware content and partner posts. The latter being especially frustrating because they are handled by a completely separate team from the editorial team but are formatted to look like our written content even though they’re actually sponsored posts. At a team meeting after the last layoffs the CEO answered a question about the company’s plans and said something to the effect of “if we’re not growing we are dead” which I think is obviously seen in how the company is re-shaping itself.

It’s been disappointing to say the least. I don’t think any of us ever operated under the illusion we were doing important journalism or anything, but we all seemed to strive to make something good of the system we were working in. I’ve seen and heard of a lot of things I find commendable of my co-workers. Editorial and mid-level leadership have worked for a long time to ensure a separation of biz dev and edit so that they don’t have influence over the written content. I heard of times when BD really tried to push, however indirectly, for partners to get higher rankings in content. As edit gets increasingly sidelined in the business by the SEO content teams I’m not sure how much this is being maintained but I don’t work in that side of the business so I can’t speak specifically.

All of this is to say. He’s right, we are just ultimately doing our jobs. Unfortunately, I’ve outlasted a lot of people who were hired after me, and up til the layoffs it was very rare for someone to quit. Now more and more of the people who have been here since the early days (even before me) are peeling away. Those of us who stay are seeking more and more checked out. Honestly the benefits are excellent and I think that’s what keeps most of us around but no one is passionate these days.

That was a super rambling post, but I don’t ever see anyone talking about this place I’ve been at for a while. I wanted to share some insight into our world and get stuff off my chest as it’s been disappointing to watch go down, if not all that unique or surprising.