Bandwidth Software Developer reviews

High turnover rate due to poor COVID WFH policies and other management decisions

Bandwidth’s response to covid was and still has been a disaster. The aggressive return to office plan (“plan” as in “everyone come back on June 2nd”) was obviously not received well, and leadership showed little care for employee’s concerns, and even made statements such as “If you want to WFH this isn’t the place for you” and “There will be covid cases in the office”. And don’t listen to any of the responses here from Bandwidth saying that flexibility has always been an option; it hasn’t. I know of at least 1 employee who was fired for wanting to continue to WFH. They backed off and became a bit more lenient after a huge backlash in slack, but this was too late. Also, covid cases have been regularly occurring in the office, and only recently has leadership been transparent about these cases. The tech (software) org needs help. In the 3 years I’ve been at Bandwidth. the company has grown 3X in employee size (excluding the Voxbone acquisition), yet the tech org has experienced minimal growth. Hiring priorities are heavily skewed to the product and sales orgs, and these orgs are continually putting more pressure on the tech org. You can’t expect more out of the tech org if you don’t hire enough software developers. This pressure also leads to low quality software being built. Time for design, planning, scaling, and tech debt cleanup is not there, and products are basically released as beta features and never become stabilized.