Labelbox reviews

Bottom line: I would avoid working here if at all possible. The reviews before mine are remarkably accurate. Leadership is either nonexistent or terrible, depending on the moment. And I’m honestly not sure which is worse. As disgruntled as I am after my experience over the past year, I’m not interested in slinging personal insults. I believe the situation speaks for itself, so I’ll stick to what I witnessed: Leadership repeatedly made decisions that left employees astonished. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but that became increasingly difficult as the decisions grew more erratic. One moment, the company was hiring aggressively. A few weeks later, it was laying off people in those same roles. Employees were reassured that their jobs were safe and that no layoffs were planned, right up until the sudden purge. These actions were presented as “strategic decisions,” but there was nothing in the air except the stench of desperation, as an organization crumbling under the weight of incompetent leadership struggles to stay standing. Transparency is treated like a forbidden resource. I still have no idea who was actually captaining the ship. Employees are rarely told what is happening, what decisions are being made, or why. On the rare occasion leadership communicates, it often arrives as paragraphs of polished AI slop that somehow say nothing of value. The lack of humanity in these comms is striking. Ask three leaders about the strategy behind an ongoing operation, and you’ll receive four different answers, probably all from Opus 4.8. As you might imagine, people and workloads are completely mismanaged. Individual contributors are usually either drowning in an ocean of work or standing around without any idea what they are supposed to do next. Meanwhile, management often seems more interested in creating the appearance of productivity, burning through tokens and generating more confusion and technical debt, than providing useful direction. AI is excellent at making people feel productive while accomplishing very little, and leadership here has completely drunk this AI Kool-Aid. Reorganizations and pivots feel almost monthly. Promotions follow the same pattern: arbitrary, inconsistent, and directionless. I watched some people receive multiple promotions for reasons that were never clear, while exceptional ICs who repeatedly saved projects received little or nothing in return. I even saw someone promoted and then let go less than two weeks later. None of it made sense. The projects and platform are similarly mismanaged. Our internal tooling is broken, difficult to work with, and a constant source of delays. To be clear, there are engineers and technical leaders who recognize these problems and genuinely want to fix them, but they are not given the resources or support they need from upper leadership. As a result, the platform makes even simple work slower and more frustrating instead of helping employees do their jobs. Upper management pushes initiatives without sufficient planning, and decisions are consistently short-sighted. Leadership claims to care about quality, yet its actions overwhelmingly prioritize short-term profit, with little concern for the consequences. Employees are expected to perform miracles without the necessary time, resources, or support. If you fall even slightly short, you are blamed. Concerns are ignored, and problems created by upper leadership decisions are routinely passed down to ICs. Overall, this is an unpredictable workplace defined by poor communication, unstable priorities, excessive workloads, and leadership that feels detached from both employees and reality. You will likely be overworked while remaining constantly in the dark about what is happening around you. The one bright spot was working with some genuinely excellent individual contributors, but unfortunately, even most of them are gone now.

Labelbox stays true to form on the glassdoor reviews. When I initially interviewed, I asked about the negative reviews only to find a script that interviewers are trained to address them. Unfortunately, I fell for those responses. To start with, there is a high level of turnover, in an instant and without so much as a mention or trace, people just vanish out of the company. I've never seen so much churn in one place in my entire career, from upper management all the way down to ICs. Your projects change a lot over time, you have no idea if what you're building will even amount to anything, and yet you're expected to support those projects across its life cycle. Work life balance? No such thing exists here for a lot of team members (not all but most team members). If there is a client deadline for something you work on, be ready to cancel all your plans. Not only that, the systems are extremely brittle and when things break the IC's are the pain sponges with oftentimes no real systemic rectification by the feature owners. Lastly, management is clueless and inept. Management are essentially yes-men to the CEO. Most if not all of them lack vision and quite frankly are not very competent leaders. Growth? Only if management likes you. There is no real direction and it's an organization that is reactive in that they chase trends in the market and sacrifice on a lot of existing clients/programs to do so. They are coasting off their series B from 2021, old enterprise contracts, some new ones. Despite having been around longer than most companies in the space, many newer companies have already leapfrogged them significantly. All in all, this company treats employees like expendable mules, and also lack business and innovation sense and direction. Worst of all worlds.