To start, Edmunds is extremely top heavy. In fact, it seems there are more people with manager and director titles than engineers / analysts. Certain groups suffer more from this affliction than others but it seems pervasive at a company level. Titles are handed out based on politics and tenure alone. Things are run straight out of a community college MBA handbook. And, as we all know, being a Manager or higher means you don’t touch a lick of work yourself so over half the company is inundated in perpetual ‘strategy’ meetings while the rest of the peasants do the actual work with little to no direction.
Waste is another issue. Positions are opened and filled without any consideration as to whether more resources are actually required. A large number of people sit around all day twiddling their thumbs. If you randomly fired 1 / 3 of the people at the company, I’m not sure anybody would notice after the initial 1-2 week chaos (this goes double for Directors, and triple for VP and up). Actually I have a suggestion: given how panicked the Execs get when we’re 1% below revenue budget, maybe you should follow the aforementioned advice. That’s an easy way to save a few million dollars per year. We might even be able to get our Bonusly budget up to a whopping $20 per month. I digress.
On the technology and innovation front, Edmunds is hit or miss depending on your group. Some groups do semi-cool things and some don’t. Some groups doing cool things will get reprioritized and roped into boringness based on the whims of executives. The company is very reactionary, even though it constantly touts that it can afford to think long term as a result of staying private.
Our implementation of ROWE is an absolute joke and you can easily ‘work from home’ multiple times per week and nobody would notice or care. ‘Urgency’ is one of our values but the only time I’ve seen true ‘Urgency’ here is when catered lunch goes out. Bottom line; stay here if you just want to coast. The company will probably keep making decent money (but that all goes to the Chairman). If you’re not very skilled then definitely take advantage of the Edmunds charity payroll. If you’re very talented then the pay is going to be significantly below market when compared to brand name tech companies. Edmunds is a place for subpar technical/product people to retire in a ruthlessly ambitious middle-management mediocrity.
