Constant Contact was great, but Endurance needs to figure things out
Pros
I joined Constant Contact about three years ago before they were acquired by Endurance International Group. The first couple of years at CTCT were great, we had the "work hard, play hard" mentality. The parties, beer cart, customer visits, volunteering events, E4E conferences, and Innoloft were all of the reasons why I first wanted to join the Constant Contact family. They also started a great program for new grads to get their foot in the door at their first job out of college. Unfortunately, I left the company for other reasons, but a big portion of it was how Endurance has handled CTCT since the acquisition (occurred about a year ago) which I will get into in the cons. For some other pros, CTCT as its own company is great. The people are great. Everyone is really smart and no one has any problems with helping others out. The mentor-ship they provide to the younger folks is bar none. We still get beer cart Fridays. Hackathons take place from time to time and there are some training sessions for expanding your range of skills. Career advancement can be picky depending on what team you're on. Work/life balance is great. I rarely got an email on the weekends, and for a majority of the time when the day is over you can put your work down and continue it tomorrow.
Cons
A big part of what made Constant Contact was its culture. We were helping small businesses work smarter for their customers and in essence made them more successful in the process. Ever since the acquisition and the first round of lay-offs you could tell right off the bat that the culture was going to take a deep dive for the worst. I don't know how to describe it, but the environment I felt around the office the past year was "dread or depressed". We lost that spark that made CTCT well...CTCT. We closed down the Innoloft area were we held numerous conferences and it also was a place for us to work one-on-one with the small businesses themselves. It was also a place to relax, party, collaborate, and enjoy each others company. Upper-management seemed to have a really hard time integrating CTCT with the Endurance family, because it seemed like they didn't know what they wanted to do with us after we got acquired. We were given a big project at the beginning of last year that was supposed to be delivered in three months. My team and others busted their tails off and got what they needed to get done, but Endurance decided to scrap the project. Since then, there have been MULTIPLE projects where we go whole-hog and end up scraping it after people have spent hundred of hours on it. It seems like the higher ups don't know what to do with us and are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. We have a road map that we plan on following stating the "wants" and "whats", but they never went into the "hows". We also have shifted our focus from "Customers first" to "Make the most money". We no longer strive to be the best with customer success or support...really, we just want the customer's money now. Because of all of the changes going on last year we have had a complete re-org almost three times. Engineers, mangers, POs are moving teams constantly. I know this sounds harsh, but the truth hurts sometimes. If we were still our own separate entity I would have given this review five stars, but knocked it down to three because of Endurance.
