Ancestry reviews

- Political environment. Need to play the game and kiss up to people to get things done or advance your career. - Top heavy company. Senior people are in meetings all day. Junior people do 90% of the work and then each layer in the hierarchy makes some edits to add value. Unfortunately, company seems to value people who can't execute above the people doing the actual work. Example: senior people already get equity when they join the company, and if they try to leave, company throws more cash and equity at them. Junior people don't get equity these days (and if they do, it's not enough to matter), and if they try to leave, company doesn't do much to try to retain them. - Retention issue. Recently a bunch of people in multiple departments left. In teams where there is barely anyone left, company gave promotions to get them to stick around longer. Should have focused on retention in the first place instead of reacting to it. - Program Management is stuck-up because they prioritize your projects. They should be held accountable for keeping projects on track. - Work environment isn't always professional. - Limited career growth. Company always encourages lateral movement. A lot of promotions happened because those people threatened to leave and their team was already short staffed, so the company had to give them something to keep them around. - Senior leadership only wants honest feedback if it's positive. - People are generally comfortable but not motivated. Excluding senior management, the smart/ambitious people have left or are planning on leaving. People who are still there are new, have settled or can't find a job elsewhere. - Unless you're coming in as at least a director, you'll be working hard to make people at the top rich once the company sells itself.

Ancestry's management is horrible and obsessed with catchphrases that they haven't even considered the true meaning of- ex. "speed of innovation". If they knew what speed of innovation was, they wouldn't be years behind 23andMe in the rollout of DNA health products. The company is run as if engineers are just meaningless cogs in the machine which have no input into the products they develop. The company is very management heavy- the ratio of managers to engineers is strangely high. Also the pay is low compared with other companies in the area (SF).