The Negative Reviews are Right: Avoid the Sinking Ship
Pros
- The people; your peers...but even just today yet another talented developer told me that "all the people he could learn from have left"...so he too is now leaving. It's not long before all the wonderful people that once made up this place are also gone. There's entire departments that don't even have the same people they did less than a year ago. - Compensated for billable, hourly work beyond 40 hours/week if you work in Production - Dogs in the office - Free snacks and beer (kind of?)
Cons
- Brand identity crisis. Our own website reflects this; it's embarrassing. - 0 vision from upper management and poor communication. Lots of unkept promises. Continuous "rescue mission" vision and goal restarts. You get the impression you're constantly being lied to, which is disappointing at best and insulting at worst. - In a recent all-company meeting with our EC team, a woman in the audience asked about our executive team's focus and plan for hiring more women in leadership. The response? "We have 2. And I think that's good." Just pathetic. If you're lying to us about everything else, you may as well lie and make it sound like you care about opportunities for women in leadership at The Nerdery. - We receive at least a couple of emails every day with announcements for people putting their notice in. - The company can't hire fast enough to keep up with the turnover so all projects are in a constant resourcing crisis state (it doesn't help that our Resourcing Department is comprised of a whole 2 people). - No real professional development support. HR has never provided this and they eliminated the role of professional development managers who once provided this valuable service -- a benefit that used to set The Nerdery a part from every other chop shop. They promoted a bunch of "working managers" who have no idea how to actually manage people and are expected to do so without experience while also balancing a full-time, billable workload. They said this was because the previous professional development managers created more barriers than collaboration and now we're empowered to manage ourselves (which actually means doing more work with less support for the same pay). Common guys, we're not idiots. I would mention career path in this point, but there is none here. - They organized everyone into "cross-functional teams" because that probably sounded nice and "diverse" on paper, but what it has resulted in is a disconnection from your expertise and support on improving within your domain. Picture starting as a UX Designer and your manager and team knowing nothing about InVision or any UX templates and your PM having to actually share these things with you because you have no actual UX department to rely on. - These gaps in support add a ton more responsibility to Project Management's responsibilities: professional development and coaching, resourcing, etc. - The Nerdery Holiday Party was once an epic celebration and deemed a huge Nerd benefit. They rented out unique and fun venues, had crazy decorations, and flew everyone in from all locations. It felt like a great extended family get-together. This year, they are now hosting the party at the office (I already work more than 50 hours per week, I don't need to spend my little free time at the office too). They are no longer flying everyone in; they said we'd probably prefer to have more "intimate" parties at each location instead (which is of course code for budget cuts). Please don't insult our intelligence and act like this is for the benefit of the employees when it actually only benefits your bottom line. - People used to gather in the Nerditorium for a "Bottlecap" presentation every Friday. Barely anyone attends these now. They had to even take a poll to see if we should still have them. Why? Because people don't want to be at The Nerdery. People used to actually WANT to spend their free-time here. You can't create that kind of culture; it's an organic result of being a place where people actually want to BE. - It's a ghost town. Many employees retreat to working at home because...again, they don't want to be in the office. This office used to be so loud and social that there were complaints about it and now I can hear a penny drop on any given day. - Management keeps rolling out new roles without telling anyone in the company what these roles even entail, which creates all sorts of roles and responsibilities issues and questions on projects. - The sales process is completely cutoff from reality. This has always been the case. Our estimating process is off and then the projects get thrown over to Production who then has to consistently deliver the bad news. I can't remember the last project I worked on where we didn't have some sort of major resourcing, budget, or timeline crisis. This is a symptom of a deeper problem. If you're still reading this, do yourself a favor and pass on applying here right now. It's only a sad shell of what it used to be (except for the company name, which sounds deceptively "fun" and carefree). Maybe they figure themselves in 2 years. Maybe they don't and they sell. I honestly hope for the latter because trying to be something you're not is not a lie anyone wants to be a part of.
