Dickensian Home for Designers of DeLoreans - Anonymous employee NextVR Employee Review

2.0
Aug 28, 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Every company has great people, and if you love funding, open plans, dogs, beer, and small but ergonomic desks, there's a lot to like. I feel designers deserve a heads up, however.

Cons

NextVR doesn't understand design, and sadly, doesn't want to. Design here is production, never strategy. Design will never have rank, and is subjugated to engineering. Expect to be asked for cleanup after non-designers have revised things structurally (usually myopically). Workflow, governance, and infrastructure for design are all terrible. Think of what internal design models looked like about twenty years ago, not what you picture for modern tech development. Inefficiency: there is no one source for what 'good' is, so wheels are reinvented. Patterns can't be nailed down effectively; once, I listened to someone in charge extol the 'awesome' virtues of inconsistency. Maybe antidesign is the future of usability, but I doubt it. Despite my best efforts, design was isolated from end users, who Marketing owns entirely. This resulted in poor discovery, no user testing, no validation. Whole chunks of the design cycle were missing or broken. Expect to get the wrong input, from the wrong person, at the wrong time. Be prepared. There are no design sprints, and while I was at NextVR, design was removed even from regular sprints. You heard correctly. Expect your role to be blurry, and your schedule a surprise. Don't assume 'sprints' means anything typically considered Agile is going on. You might think this is to be expected at a startup, and one of your jobs is to improve things. In my experience, meaningful conversations about addressing these issues will go absolutely nowhere, and inquiries are likely to be outright ignored. I call this cricket management. You will not be understood, heard, helped, or even looked at in the eye by executives, processes, or product management.

Explore other reviews about NextVR

5.0
Jan 24, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

great benefits and team enviroment

Cons

cant think of any at the moment, I had a great time working there.

4.0
Jan 16, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There were always meals and snacks provided.

Cons

Seems that the company spent too much money on keeping the employees happy versus investing into the actual business. Some people wouldn't consider this a con, but it led to them laying off 60% of the workforce to reduce overhead for the sale to Apple.

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