I was hired in mid November 2015 and immediately loved the company and my team. Things seemed to be going great, and I was performing well. A month later, I had just finished onboarding, completed my first assignment, and gotten a lot of positive feedback from my manager.
Then one day, about a week before Christmas, I was called into HR and told that there had been a "reorganization"/company-wide lay-off, and my position had been eliminated. The decision was not based on my performance. Apparently, my position had been open for about a year because my team had been very picky about selecting candidates and would only hire the perfect candidate. When they finally hired me, they did not confirm that they still had the funding available to support my position, which in my opinion, was very unprofessional. Who hires somebody without first confirming the budget with upper management?
I was hired at the end of the year when all of the planning for Q1 was being completed. According to their public financial statements, they recently lost $8 million in the last quarter and are now in the red. They looked at their budget projections for the next few years and got scared, which instigated this round of layoffs and caused them to make some unprofessional decisions.
While Opower certainly knows how to have fun, they came across as very disorganized to me. They're hiring people at an astronomical rate yet obviously can't afford to support all of these positions. Signs indicate that the company is in trouble and things aren't as stable as they initially let on. If I were still employed at Opower or thinking of joining, I would be concerned about the stability of this company.
