Whenever I read a negative Glassdoor review, my default reaction is that I’m only hearing one side of the story, and that this might be coming from a really troublesome employee. I’m here to say: I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life. I’ve been promoted often and valued at precious companies. DraftKings was just an all-around terrible experience for me. I will say that, like most jobs, the experience is heavily dependent on your manager. My manager was everything that I’ve been trained my whole career NOT to be. He required an immediate response anytime he ever sent a Slack message. Even if you are on a call with someone. This led to a culture of people on the team constantly distracted during meetings because half the time was spent chatting. During 1:1 video calls, our dynamic was fine. But he would wait until we were chatting on Slack to send me dissertations as to why he was disappointed in me. “Disappointed” was his favorite word. A colleague that also reported to him, would follow his lead and send extremely aggressive attacking messages to me and others in Slack about once a month. And then the next day, act like nothing happened. When I asked my manager to talk to her about the unprofessionalism, he would always say that he saw nothing wrong with her behavior. Eventually, I had a conversation with HR because I was full of anxiety and quite miserable. HR repeatedly asked me to talk to my manager’s manager, something I was not comfortable with. I felt like this would put me in a bad light, but she insisted I should reach out. Before I reached out, his manager reached out to me, meaning that the HR person took it upon herself to make this conversation happen. Fortunately, it was a good chat, and was followed by a couple of good chats with my manager. Things were actually better than they’d ever been. 6 weeks later, I was laid off. No one else in the department was. Just me. It’s hard to believe that this was not retaliation. In my “you are being laid off” conversation, I was told that my severance would be 4 weeks pay, I would keep my insurance through the end of the next month (about 5.5 weeks) and then DK would pay for COBRA coverage for the following month. Reality: I was given 2 weeks severance. When I asked about this, I was told “oh you must have confused 4 weeks with how long your insurance was going to remain in place.” Then my insurance was cut off after 8 days. They eventually fixed that, but my son goes to full time therapy in place of school, and he had to be home for two days, while I was in the midst of final interviews for a new job. And then when COBRA was supposed to kick in, guess what happened? Nothing! I called COBRA, and they said that the employer had not paid for coverage yet. So again, my son had to stay home for 2 days while I was in the midst of interviews and not alternative child care. Awful experience as an employee. Awful experience even after I was gone. I was so excited about getting this job and was determined to make it work instead of just running away when things got difficult, but for the rest of my life, I will speak of DraftKings as 9 months of pure hell.
