AfterShip Software Developer reviews

Though the original idea for the company worked out well making it feasible to run the company in a sustainable way, the founders are incompetent mangers for a company of its size. Their typical strategy for product development is to copy ideas from competitors left and right. Lack of overall vision is a key aspect of their management style. Instead of carefully studying the market needs in an objective way, they resort to taking subjective measures resulting in continuous and costly trial and error. The same goes for managing employees expectations. Neither of the founders have a good technical background to manage the engineers they hire. Lot of the efficiencies that could be achieved with a more engineering mind set were skipped simply because the founder/CEO did not understand how it would work. The efficiency loss/technical debt was accounted for with a lot of manual/repetitive work on tight deadlines for the engineers, many of whom quit in a short period of time.

Lack of mentoring. This company does not have an experienced senior, an expert who could be a mentor and share his skills. In AfterShip technical objectives are at the bottom of the priority list. Top priority is new product’s MVP or the ‘just-make-it-work’ objectives. Software engineers that want to explore more intuitive approaches that require a bit more time, are often shut down. Last thing, blame culture - every quarter review founders admitted the blame culture problem, which stem from them. As long as I was working in AfterShip it was noticeable and unresolved.