Pros
Great product. Good place to work on your resume. Interesting project work. Historically, world class in-office experience. Perks and benefits like top notch catered meals, snacks and drinks. Flexible PTO that people actually use. The offices have historically been in good locations. Employer contributions to commute cost. Historically decent benefits overall. There are amazing people at Intercom and in spite of my overall negative impression of the company, it wouldn’t be fair to lump everyone at the company together. By and large there are good people trying to do good work. Unfortunately, these folks have ended up part of an undesirable story. Read back through past reviews and you’ll see nothing has changed. I am far from the first person to observe that Intercom has a serious problem with finding reasons to fire people. They make a big deal of their hiring process and then blame their employees for being the wrong hire. The company culture I am most reminded of is Theranos. When all the good people are leaving, what does it say about those that choose to stay? But if you're down for a trial by fire and a lot of work related stress, you could make some good friends and I guess it builds character.
Cons
There’s huge inconsistency in the quality of experience across teams. Core administrative teams are the most concerning. I saw amateur-level chaos on the Finance and People teams that shouldn’t exist in a company of this tenure. I expect the sophomoric nonsense is due to the combination of abnormally high burn and churn on these teams and toxic, unprofessional old timers. These problems are particularly bad on the Intercom IT team. The numbers speak for themselves and they have nothing good to say about the leadership and its pathological failure to retain people on the IT team, especially in SF. Far too often companies look for reasons to get rid of people. If they were worth hiring, they should be worth keeping. It’s easier to lose someone than to invest in keeping them. Putting in the work to build a team and company culture that people want to be a part of will pay immense dividends over time. But behavior exposes the truth and values of people and the organizations they construct. I observed Intercom’s IT leadership favor shadow politics, whisper networks, and toxic management practices over investment in their employees - over and over. Each time it happened I was assured that it wasn't normal and to not worry about it - it was unfair to judge them because this wasn't the way things usually went at Intercom. All evidence to the contrary aside though I guess, hindsight is 20/20. Great leadership is based on trust and humility but I ultimately experienced the IT leaders at Intercom as two-faced braggarts heavily vested in a culture of passive aggressive condescension There are successful companies with poisonous personalities corrupting them. This is one. The IT experience at Intercom is shaped by the Machiavellian machinations of morally bankrupt milksops. Given the rotten core, I believe nothing can ever improve for IT at Intercom. Their leaders are in the habit of dumping people with an abandon that is lacking in humanity, humility, or self-awareness. I saw them make no consideration of the effect on company/team morale or how their choices reflected on them. This team chews people up and spits them out. SF is the HQ of Intercom in name only. Dublin is the actual HQ. The leaders seem to keep SF in a constant state of flux in a proactively paranoid bid to maintain total control. It’s possible this is just incompetence masquerading as malice - but it really feels like many folks in Dublin resent the existence of the SF office and the need to interact with colleagues there. Dublin Intercomrades can often appear to deliberately sabotage their SF teammates and subvert their projects. Then again, I've seen Dublin reviews indicating that office has its own systemic problems. During my time there, I saw Intercom demonstrate that they truly value an unstable, unsafe, toxic work environment. They seem to solve all issues by quickly firing people instead of making any effort to work things out. Maybe they’d make an exception for their CEO. Maybe they already have. Tired platitudes from upper management ring hollow on these reviews. I saw a great show made of ‘transparency’ but it’s a sham. I found no substance to Intercom. It’s all smoke, mirrors, and misdirection. The exec responses to the reviews on GlassDoor are just that. Lip service forever - action never. I‘ve never worked at a more pretentious or deluded company. I‘ve never worked with worse managers than those Intercom sees fit to employ in IT.
