I have not worked at Ancestry for over 8 years now. so take this with a grain of salt. However, after speaking with some friends who were thinking of applying here, I decided to share my experience. This was while they were still based in Provo, UT. Middle-management cannot see past a spreadsheet and are about as useful as sun-tan lotion to a drowning man. The team I worked for was dedicated to double checking the work of volunteers. We had to be familiar with probates for each state as well as read cursive from the 1800s. Needless to say, you needed to be a fluent English speaker to do the job. Middle management decided it would be best to outsource nearly our entire team to the Philippines. A job that required a fluent level of knowledge in English outsourced to the Philippines. That's the level of boneheadedness we got from middle management at Ancestry. To make matters worse, the people they decided to get rid of first were the people who had clocked the least amount of work in the tool we used to double-check the volunteer's work. It wasn't a bad idea, if you can't see past a spreadsheet. I was so good at my job that I got pulled into doing special projects all day, every day. But that meant I had 0 usage of the main tool. I was in the first batch let go. I could see it as being a mistake, but four of us got pulled into that first meeting. Out of the four, three of us, myself included, were doing special projects for our entire shift, so we didn't have any time at all clocked in the regular tool. That isn't a mistake, that's flat out incompetence on the part of middle management who couldn't understand anything that wasn't laid out in columns and rows. There was also no point in explaining anything to them, because they didn't understand the world outside of their spreadsheets. It didn't matter that we were so good at our job that we were the ones made to check on everything before it went out to the volunteers. The only thing that mattered to middle management was our bad numbers in the spreadsheets.
