What makes Edmunds exasperating is the astoundingly myopic senior managment, 35-40 grossly overpaid project managers, HR keystroke spying, infrequent time to use your vacation, cliquey silos, someone else taking credit for your ideas, projects that span years, reactionary ever-changing corporate road maps, design-by-committee, top-heavy management, and an endless stream of worthless life-sucking meetings. There are meetings for planning, strategy, project kick offs, project recaps, burn-downs, advertising, sales, training, education, vaccinations, grief counseling, fire drills, harassment, ethics, morals, mentoring...truly a bottomless pit of meetings which everyone must attend and negatively affects their core product, morale and certainly the bottom line. There were (and I'm not kidding) meetings ABOUT MEETINGS. Add to that a slew of tri-annual mandatory off-site meetings where you must arrive at the LA Convention Center at 8am to listen to a monotone CFO ramble on for hours about operating margins, unique cookies, capitol expenditures, and bonuses that are rarely doled out. Edmunds prefers to waste their coffers on inept VP saleries and severely overpriced data centers and bloated Engineering costs. This 400 person company could honestly be run better with 20 people, an Amazon Cloud stack and Joomla!.
If the owners would stop the buck, they could give out bonuses but they do not know how and at the end of the day, almost nobody in Senior managment really knows that much about building a website. They know how to build a revenue-generating ad-serving company, but check the education and histories of the Directors, VPs, and Managers on LinkedIn or Google and you'll find an abundance of experience better suited to run a hedge fund.
I never felt like anyone was in charge. I never felt safe in my employment. I learned a lot but do not miss it.
