Despite all these pluses, after 14 years in IT operations Demand Media has, hands-down, one of the most politics-laden and mismanaged operations environments I've ever seen... Chronically random enterprise environments, operations groups that rarely communicated with each other (and in a few cases even flatly refused to), random layoffs with virtually no consideration for the operational support holes left behind in the process, and more. At least once while I was there an entire dev ops team supporting one of their bigger products was restructured by one manager--existing people abruptly let go and replaced with people he wanted, and the environment restructured with little or input from other operations teams or business units. I was once even ordered to stop work on a project (which everyone agreed was badly needed and which eventually became one of the company's standard operations support tools) because, I was told, it's success was making my boss's boss look bad politically (he had been given budget to do the same thing and hadn't made significant progress). The company's customer-facing downtime reflects this sort of thing. Demand Media is also notorious for low pay per industry standard, which is typically justified by throwing in stock options. But as of this writing the stock is $2/share lower than it was at this time last year and barely 1/4 of what it was when the company went public 2 1/2 years ago. While I was there these things and more were taking their toll on many operations and dev personnel and turnover rates were significant.
