Intercom reviews

3.8

76% would recommend to a friend

(96 total reviews)
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Eoghan McCabe

69% approve of CEO

86% positive business outlook

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96 reviews

Reviews about "Culture"

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3.0
Mar 21, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Well engineered product - General sense of attention to detail across company - Good hiring standards, incredible coworkers - Good reputation in tech

Cons

- Controlling, manipulative, and condescending CEO (Hi Eoghan! Can't wait to read your essay reply to this!) - Only just barely started asking for (non-mandatory) manager training - Lots of values get talked about, promised, never acted on - Require employees to do all heavy lifting on diversity and inclusion initiatives - Coworkers feel forced to leave, or leave because circumstances never improve for them. No trust for ICs (mileage may vary on other teams).

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Intercom Response
7y
While I appreciate the feedback, I'd encourage you or any current employee to come talk to me directly. I don't mind that you have posted your thoughts here, because they sound sincere, but it’s almost impossible to affect change if we can have a dialog. I feel like we are implementing a bunch of new programs that address some of your concerns. It will take some time for them to take root but I am confident that they will have a positive impact.
2.0
Mar 3, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are a few rare gems (people) who are extremely talented and have managed to carve out a niche for themselves where they have the space to do great work. Most people are very kind and friendly. You would probably enjoying hanging out with them outside work.

Cons

Lots of talk about all the things that are going to improve (diversity, compensation, autonomy, etc.) but rarely does it happen. The CEO regularly answers questions with “we’re working on it” and then years will go by without any updates or progress. The long list of company values are really more aspirational than intended to be lived. Everyone talks a good game about how important they are and how long-term focused the company is but you quickly start to see what the company really values. Engineering is drowning in urgency and working reactively without putting thought into what they do. Teams skip from one project to the next shipping as quickly as possible without going back to clean up or iterate on what they just shipped. The codebase is a mess. There are five different ways to do virtually everything because people will start making improvements but then be unable to get the time to actually finish the improvements. I watched the engineering team become less and less productive but cover it up by hiring more and more people rather than investing in making the existing people more productive. Management is extremely inexperienced (and so are the people they’re managing) so no one realizes the way everyone is working is detrimental. Loads of junior and intermediate engineers, very few senior engineers. Mentorship is nonexistent and you won’t realize how little you’re learning and leveling up until you join a company that actually has it baked into its culture.

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Intercom Response
7y
To the author: Hey. Very sorry to see you’re feeling this way. I always loved having you around and have fond memories of the fun times. I’m wishing you the very best. Would love if our paths crossed in the future. Feel free to reach out to me any time. You know where to find me. To the reader: For some context, we unfortunately had to let this person go. I didn’t hear that there was this much upset over that. That said, there is some truth to some of their points. Regarding “CEO regularly answers questions with ‘we’re working on it’…”: I guess it depends on your perspective. Just last week I had someone who was here 4 years on their last day tell me just how much insane progress we had made on these and other issues. It’s true though that when questions come up at All Hands I’ll frequently let people know the way in which we’re thinking about those issues and how we want to address them, well ahead of having specific plans to put action in place. I need to better set expectations. There indeed are SO MANY areas that have SO MUCH room for improvement. I’m really excited to work on these things. The next few years will see some significant leveling up in how we work as an organization. We’ve just added some great execs that are already making material progress. Regarding product and engineering in SF: Every company has their strengths and weaknesses. Intercom’s strengths by far are in software development. It was founded by 4 people who studied CS with a simple desire to build cool tech. Read a few of our hundreds of posts about product and strategy, come to one of our events, talk to some of our engineers. You’ll get it instantly. We have three offices which do software development. Dublin (7.5 years old), London (18 months old), SF (~2 years old). Dublin was started by the founders. It’s humming. People are highly engaged and super productive. Shipping incredible work. Our last engagement survey scored over 80% in that office. London similarly is killing it. It’s an incredible bunch of people. They got up to speed so fact. They also scored north of 80%. Importantly, London was seeded by Dublin folks. But unfortunately SF was an independent group that grew out of our former growth team and was only recently absorbed into our global R&D org 6 months ago. Before then we had a couple missteps with leaders and managers and definitely struggled to have SF and Dublin work together well. This is all changing rapidly. We have been discussing at our exec team offsite this week, and our global heads of Product and Engineering who built Dublin and London are in town making changes and big plans for the future of SF R&D. Personally I am EXTREMELLY bullish on the future of SF R&D. There is already great things happening there, lots of amazing people, a couple new leaders coming on-board. Give it 2-3 quarters.
4.0
Feb 11, 2019

Lots of growth

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I was hired at Intercom at a very exciting time...lots of organizational growth and advancement of the product in a short amount of time. The people and culture at Intercom were great during my time there, but felt there was a lot of disorganization with management, especially amongst the sales team.

Cons

Lots of outside hiring and no defined career path made it difficult to stay. Unrealistic expectations for some of the department quotas.

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Intercom Response
7y
Thanks for your kind words and your feedback. We’ll get better. I promise.
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