Ancestry reviews

3.5

52% would recommend to a friend

(786 total reviews)
avatar

Howard Hochhauser

80% approve of CEO

54% positive business outlook

Ancestry has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 786 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Ancestry employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

786 reviews
2.0
Mar 31, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Good work/life balance, most of the company leaves around 4:30. Office is 80% empty on Fridays - Very rare encounters with immature, big ego people - Free lunch on Mondays - Good location: 2 blocks from Caltrain. Nice view of AT&T park

Cons

- Benefits and pay slightly lower than average - Quality of the code is under constant neglect. Product deadlines and marketing campaigns will always take priority over quality - Huge meetings culture. 2-4 hours a day for an individual contributor, and get worse as you grow in ranks. Team leads are so booked with meetings, many leads don't end up coding at all - Everyone avoids any type of a conflict, if you do encounter a non-compromising person on the project, there is little support for negotiating between parties - Dev teams' opinion of direction of project is rarely taken into account - Stock options is a privilege of only Director level and above - In 2018, Senior Team laid off around 10% of engineers without consulting managers and with no explanation whatsoever. Only mentioned it wasn't financial or performance reasons, but keep hiring for the same positions - Annual re-org and re-invent of scrum with shuffling teams and people around throws off team cohesion

2.0
Jul 31, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Mission. Few places can boast about what they can offer to the customer.

Cons

Pay After interviewing with a number of places, including big tech and smaller startups, you quickly realize any other place will offer at least $50k more in base salary and at least double your equity. For those of us whom pay is important but maybe not the most important, what really drives me mad is company offers retention bonuses ($50k+) and promotion when employees notify they are leaving. What about those who are still with the company? More work gets dumped on them without any increase in benefits. I have been with the company for over 4 years. Manage 6x more directs vs when I first started and still make basically the same pay (marginal 10% increase vs 4 years ago). Poor leadership Senior leaders only care about their own verticals. Marketing blames product for poor customer experience. Product blames marketing for over promising product. Marketing focuses on improving $ growth where product focuses on improving engagement. As the result, no innovation is successful because of lack of alignment between departments. Focus on bottom line vs customer This has to be the biggest frustration. Company took pricing recently because why not? Every other company is doing it. Let’s make more money. OKR’s state revenue and user growth which contradict each other and at the end of the day, leaders only care about making their bonuses at the expense of customers.

1.0
Jan 13, 2019

Poor leadership

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great product and service that employees can be proud of.

Cons

Leaders continue to say the right thing but have consistently proven they don’t mean it. The downward spiral in the culture started when the CFO took over as interim CEO. Although long known within the finance org as a poor leader who only looks out for himself, the appointment of him as interim CEO allowed him to introduce his dishonesty and narcissistic ways to the rest of the Company. Although there were high hopes when a permanent CEO joined, there have been no improvements thus far.

Viewing 28 - 30 of 786 Reviews

Glassdoor has 910 Ancestry reviews submitted anonymously by Ancestry employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Ancestry is right for you.