Nerdery reviews

It’s been mentioned a lot, but pay could be better. They recognized it was an issue and said they were working on it, but it rarely felt like progress was made. Even promotions ended up just being a standard merit increase. Even when it came to hardware, it was impossible to get a new machine in order to do your work because it wasn’t in the budget. While there were some awesome projects at the company, the focus had shifted towards CMS work that they could turn out quickly. Unfortunately Nerdery had decided a while back it wasn’t interested in this kind of work and laid off a bunch of CMS developers and projects. There’s been a recent shift towards hiring junior talent. This was exciting at first, but it seems like the decision was mostly around reducing costs. Often times these people would not get the support they needed and were thrown onto projects by themselves. Mentorship is mentioned a lot, but resources (especially time) aren’t allocated towards it. They also like to talk about their diversity initiative, but it felt they were trying to check a box. There were talented woman who were overlooked for promotions. Internal processes are a mess. Trying to make any changes around the company are met with hoops to jump through and an unclear process. Even as a principal level engineer I found it difficult to make meaningful change. Nobody seems to be able to answer questions or you get different answers depending on who you ask. Nerdery markets itself as a partner, but often makes choices that are more profitable for Nerdery and not in the best interest of the client. Often times suggestions or warnings are made by devs and ignored by delivery leads or client partners. Nerdery also likes to market itself as innovative, but Nerdery as of late has lacked in that. It seemed like they were more interested in comparing themselves to other companies than forging a path driven by innovation. That lack of innovations comes into play in market offerings. They played catch up in Cloud and are still failing on putting out a decent offering. Often times they were chasing market trends than focusing on what they were good at. Nerdery has become focused on profit over everything. It became painfully obvious that they were trying to make their bottom line look good in order to sell. Talented people are treated as just another cost, just another number, and they lost a lot of talent because of it. Upper management doesn’t seem to be interested in change. They surround themselves with just more of the same, confirming their biases. Even the internal surveys they would twist the numbers to fit their narrative. A couple years I would have recommended Nerdery as a place to grow, but with the recent shifts in priorities, I can no longer say that. If you’re an up and coming developer, look at other places for opportunities.

Personal/Professional Growth - most average sized projects are undersold and don't allow proper time for learning which means others take on those responsibilities. Language specific developer or GTFO - If you work in a CMS all the time (hired as a WordPress or Drupal dev, for example), and you do nothing but those projects, your chances of "Leveling Up" are next to none without making a huge deal and having to prove that you know what you're doing. Reviews - Many never had reviews done on time, which meant no raise or promotion when warranted. Also, if you do a wide variety of things, like front-end code, and php, you're only ranked by what your job description relates to. So, if you are a front-end developer, and do equally as much, if not more, PHP, your front-end code will be the only deciding factor in your raise and how you're ranked as a developer within the company. That's demoralizing enough. And if you are going against the strict coding standards because the project or CMS specifically calls for it, that may be held against you depending on the reviewer. Transparency? - When i first started, the company was very transparent. Then we doubled in size. You hardly saw the CEO anymore, our monthly "Mind Meld" (company gathering to review the month and show upcoming plans) stopped, and all you ever heard was "we're still transparent" when really they weren't. Popularity Contest - It always felt that in order to get promoted, you had to be buddy-buddy with seniors or higher to get anywhere. If you're friends with senior management, you'll go places almost immediately. Politics - Office politics thrive within this company. If a PM has enough friends and doesn't like that you disagreed with him/her on something, others will know and those others will more than likely think low of you from then on. There are definitely groups within the office and if you don't fit into one of them, you're kind of screwed. Compensation/Benefits - Pretty bad. There used to be unlimited sick time, but because of the abuse, they got rid of it. They claim to have competitive benefits and salary, but if you look at 90% of software development companies in the area, you'll see that's largely false. Projects - Sales runs this company, but not in the obvious way. Too many projects were undersold during my time due to the lack of respect that Account Executives and Software Engineers had for the actual process. It caused projects to go over budget, angry clients, and sometimes making the assigned developer or the PM look bad. Time tracking - You fill your timesheet out with blocks no larger than 4 hours, and each day MUST contain at least 8 hours. Admin time (idle, training, etc.) MUST be put on your timesheet as well. You also MUST do your timesheet each and every day. If you don't, your manager tells you to drop everything immediately to get it done from the day before. With how project tasks are split out into individual entities to bill to, it's overwhelming at times. Instead of having a front-end bucket, back-end bucket, or design bucket, you would have a sidebar module task, homepage carousel task, etc. that you would bill to individually and each have an hour limit on it. Project managers and project leads are not always responsive when you need more hours, thus making your timesheet get behind on an almost weekly basis, which in turn would get you yelled at for not having your timesheet up to date. Due to projects being undersold at times, if your task runs out of hours, and you need more, some project managers will get angry, and some account executives will get angry as well because of their mistake since they have to ask the client for more money. Overall, I never felt treated like an adult.