Pros
Nerdery does a lot of fun events and activities which help with culture. In my time there were lots of different activities like their annual event pentathnerd which is like an Olympics for nerds with fun challenges. There was always lots of swag sent out. We played games and there was always a culture of sending shout outs for good work.
Cons
Where to begin? Escalation paths do not exist. When escalating issues to leadership it becomes a blame game and pointing fingers instead of coming up with a solution to the problem or coaching. There is absolutely no accountability at the leadership level. That also extends to making business decisions. There are several broken processes and structural changes that need to happen but leadership is just sitting on them and not taking action which is frustrating to both old and new employees. Additionally a lot of the managers were promoted to manager not because of their leadership skills but just because they were the best at their job title. This is frustrating because they do not know how to lead or coach and if you don’t do it their way then you aren’t good enough even if you achieve the same results a different way. Your review will also just be based on their opinion of you and not based off of the 360 evaluation. Also they talk about diversity. There is no diversity at leadership or management level. When leadership was asked to be more thoughtful about DEI and become more active in the DEI channel they were silent or their response is that they will hire more diversity. For a company this size they do not even have any DEI training. Lastly the teams are never setup for success. Projects are sold with incorrectly sized teams, often start before full requirements or ideas are fleshed out, then you have to surprise the client with asking for more money or telling them you can’t do things that were promised. This could easily be fixed by changing the process and making sure to add discovery in as apart of consulting but Nerdery just keeps falling into the same bad routine. Then it ends up that the team works unpaid overtime to get to the finish line. You must work 40 billable hours and meetings are not included in that for developers so you are often working 45-50 or so hours. They talk about work life balance but it’s not there. Not to mention that I can almost guarantee that their financials are reported incorrectly because I found an issue with the softwares calculations and when pointed out they had to open an audit for the entire 2021 year. As a warning, Nerdery seems like they are growing but in my time there attrition because of these issues and losing business was around 30%. When I started there was about 250 and when I left there was maybe 200 or less.