Little to no regard for the comfort and care of their employees :/ Cool product but Profits>>People
Pros
Very cool, cutting-edge technology, great customers, kind colleagues
Cons
If you are in outside sales, they cut corners to save money every chance. If you exceed your goals, there is no reward for strong performance or recognition. Instead, we were met with not only increased targets for the following year (this is standard), but a major pay cut that they said would be to pay for additional marketing funds and employees (who were then never hired). Despite all of the sales folks covering conference demonstrations and following up on these deals + spending many nights away from home, the senior leadership categorized these activities as marketing-driven, and gave many of the sales credits to the marketing team in order to justify the new sales pay structure/pay cuts (though I doubt the marketing team even saw a pay raise for this either- just a good excuse to cut pay for the outside sales folks). The new pay structure that we were rewarded with was not getting paid on any deals until we hit a pretty sizeable threshold of our quarterly target with $0 of backpay for the work that we did. They constantly change your geographies so any deals you have worked on for a long time (sales cycle is at least a year for most) then get passed off to others. For anyone hired as a junior rep, it was clear the goals for both promotion and eventual commission were constantly changed, making it unclear in the end how anyone had a path to promotion. During my time, they changed their roles from having outside customer sales-focused interaction to troubleshooting and customer care - not the job description that they eagerly signed up for. The company tells prospective employees that there is a 401k match, but the vesting schedule is 6 years so if you are there less than that, you get absolutely $0 of that match - this was so poorly explained during onboarding because the HR department is almost non-existent (though the HR folks are kind people - they are also short staffed). The HR department is also merged with the CFO so there really are no "checks and balances" and any complaints really go nowhere. The company is run by a sole proprietor, so anything he says goes and any feedback from middle level managers does not really influence the top-down decisions... I don't think any lasting change will happen until the leadership changes. During conferences, we were asked a few times to stay in horrible hotels and even airbnbs in order to meet the company low-cost requirements - this was really troubling in high-cost cities for meals as well (and also unbelievable given the massive profits and positive financial position the company is in). They also did not reimburse for water bottles purchased at conferences for the booth/didn't slot this in their marketing budget - how is that even allowed if water is a necessity? They are now asking for pre-approval for all reps to drive far distances in their territories to visit customers which discourages hands-on activities. Their technical support people are really incredible, but so short staffed I'm not sure how they keep their heads above water and the tables often have issues that require a lot of troubleshooting. Looking ahead, as most of the funding seems to come from government grants that are gifted to schools (which increased a lot post COVID-19), I think outside sales pay will be very much at risk if there are major cuts to the Department of Education in 2025 and beyond (outside of any of the cuts the senior leaders already have planned for them).
