Fact◆Article
My investigation into Pollen's collapse uncovered unpaid salaries, silently cancelled health insurance, and a CTO-triggered $3.2M double charge to customers that was never disclosed in a postmortem.
Provoked by being dismissed as a 'nobody' by Pollen's CEO, Orosz dug into the company and published findings of financial mismanagement and cover-ups, later feeding the story to a BBC documentary. ✦ AI generated
Gergely Orosz · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-07-08 · original ↗
I discovered unpaid salaries, silently cancelled health insurance in the US, and the CTO deliberately triggering a $3.2M double charge to customers and never publishing a postmortem, despite engineers requesting one.
Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation
- ·Unpaid salaries went undisclosed to staff
- ·Health insurance silently cancelled in the US
- ·CTO triggered $3.2M double charge to customers
- ·No postmortem published despite engineer requests
- ·Orosz was dismissed as a 'nobody' by Pollen's CEO
- ·That dismissal provoked him to dig into the company
- ·Findings later fed into a BBC documentary