ClearSlide reviews

We have a great view, a couple of balls scattered about the office, snacks and an after work group training program that hardly any one cares about, but in comparison with other San Francisco starts ups the competitive edge is seriously lacking. You can easily find a much more desirable office space complete with snacks at a number of start ups in this city. Not only that, but a competitive salary to match. Turnover is high, which means teams are 'lean' and expectations slam employees already exceeding their bandwidth. The demands are endless, deadlines are tight, and the sales floor runs shop. Responsibilities pile on during your tenure and your salary remains the same, apparently based on the "median salary for your job title." However, in the case of a constantly changing start-up environment, a title rarely speaks to the responsibilities you own. The con I believe is most important is the serious lack of career development opportunity. Typically "promotions" are due to an employee leaving and bubbling the others up the ladder or fluffing their title with ''senior' while their role remains stagnant. When you are trying to maintain a fresh, young workforce to fit the start up bill, this is what your employees care about. Hire managers that actually have experience and care about the development of their team as much as they care about their own success. This will come with experience. Placing managers that are under qualified, only means that their goal coming out the gates is to prove themselves and not to manage and drive the individuals on their team to success. You can repeatedly express interest in other areas or your career, but ultimately it's a hoarding game. So good luck. Goals don't align. Each team has their own objective and there is no unity towards a common goal. Everyone feels as though they are unappreciated and constantly battling other teams for an understanding. It is exhausting and results in people only mingling within their own teams.

- The code base and infrastructure is sorely lacking. Most code was hurriedly written by the CEO and fails to incorporate much of the standard technologies in place for things like ORM, Dependency Injection, etc. The databases are poorly designed and there's a huge lack of engineering support for the business intelligence / data teams. - Lack of documentation, in both the code and in a wiki. When I first arrived, there was no documentation for new hires. I had to write my own documentation so future engineers wouldn't be so lost! - I met a couple senior engineers here who made it very apparent they had no interest in helping me succeed. Simple questions were met with three word answers and an aloof expression. Fortunately, most people were not like that and I had no trouble making a couple friends :) - I have almost ten years of experience in building successful software and even leading teams. However I was brought on as a non-senior engineer (why?). More importantly, many of my ideas and suggestions for improvement were met with resistance, scrutiny, and distrust (which, truthfully, got better over time). I found some people simply had no interest in changing the status quo, or had their own ideas about how to do things and simply were uninterested in alternative viewpoints. The takeaway is that regardless of your experience, you'll need to prove yourself to be listened to at Clearslide: I concede that whether or not this is a negative thing is debatable. - The sprint planning and QA flow needs to be reworked. We spent countless hours trying to plan a week and half of work, so QA could spend an entire week testing it. QA seemed overly involved with the whole process, and there needs to be a buffer between QA and Dev to prioritize bugs so Dev isn't constantly switching gears to address small or trivial issues.