Instrument reviews

• They know all the right things to say to get you in the door but once you're there, you'll quickly realize it was all just lip service and all the things they promised are never coming. • As others have pointed out, it is incredibly cliquey. It felt like high school with the jocks and the mean girls running the campus. • Individuals with tenure seem to fail up. Complaints would regularly be filed against management but rather than dealing with those complaints, those individuals would either be promoted into new roles or the individuals filing the complaint would simply be shuffled to other teams. • HR was virtually non-existent. If you filed a complaint with HR, they would either tell you why they felt it was a non-issue or worse, they would go tell the individual that you filed a complaint against them. It left many feeling hopeless and it wasn't uncommon to see someone tucked away in tears. • Senior new hires are typically convinced to accept lower pay and a lower title with the promise of a promotion once they learn the Instrument way. With each review cycle comes a new excuse on why they are unable or unwilling to make those promotions. As a result, senior hires are a bit of a revolving door. At various points we were clapping out multiple people in a single a day. • Designers are regularly pulled mid project to chase new business opportunities. It was incredibly frustrating to not be able to see a project through. • Timelines and team size were typically insufficient which often resulted in many having to work from home on nights and weekends to pick up the slack. It completely contradicted the work/life balance they have promoted for so long. • Pay does not meet market rate. Honestly, the list of cons goes on and on but the bottom line is that I, like many, walked into my time with Instrument with so much excitement and passion and in the end, it was the darkest period of my career.

Pay isn't close to market rate. Most people I worked with who were hired from other cities, myself included, accepted significant paycuts with the promise that cost of living in Portland was lower and that the annual bonus would help close the gap. Neither was true, with the actual bonus amounting to less than half of what was promised. It's difficult to say how pay is determined since management is vocally opposed to pay transparency. Anecdotally, I was aware that a woman in my same title who was performing duties of a more senior title was paid less than I was. Outside of salary inequity, there isn't a clear protocol for HR to handle harassment incidents. A new employee handbook was released shortly before I left which declared a zero-tolerance policy, however that was not my experience when I reported an incident there. A coworker who sent my inappropriate messages multiple times while he was drunk during work, eventually followed me home after meeting me outside of the office to apologize. He stayed outside of my apartment and continued to send messages asking me to let him in. When I reported this incident to HR and showed the messages, he was simply moved to another team and I was told not to talk about it. He continued to spend time in my team's area, so I consequently avoided working at my desk for much of my time on that team after the incident. Being a woman in tech isn't easy, but in 8 years of work I've never experienced anything like this, and it's the single reason I couldn't return or recommend this company to anyone.