Everything else.
I' wrote a scathing, one page review earlier and I'm not surprised to see that it was pulled.
The fact is the truth is hard to take and rather than trying to fix the issues Neustar prefers to hire the services of a firm to post fake 5-star reviews and flag honest ones.
The fact is Neustar took an immediate nose dive ever since the influx of former AOL employees The worst thing that happened for the company was the day Jeff Ganeck stepped down and Lisa Hooks became CEO.
Cronyism was rampant and Neustar employees were be laid off to make room for former AOL staff. This was immediately following the downfall of AOL. It's no accident that AOL failed and as soon as the former AOL staffers came onboard that Neustar started down that path.
The AOL guys kept gloating about "this is how we did it at AOL" every chance they got. In one meeting an AOL crony mentioned it again and I blurted out "Didn't AOL fail?"
The company became a culture of cronyism and witch hunts. They found all manner of reasons to fire and lay off long time Neustar employees while lining the pockets of their fiends.
One such deal was for a storage array that Neustar spent several million dollars for. They brought in a retired AOL guy to come in and facilitate the deal. It turns out the salesperson for this array was that guy's son.
They fired a longtime Neustar employee because he voiced an objection to the multi-million dollar deal. Basically, we didn't need the storage array.
As soon as the deal was done and the ink was dry the guy "retired" again. Go figure.
Two years later a different set of middle tier leadership decided that storage array was unnecessary and was looking to get rid of it. It turns out we never used it anyway and thus it was redundant. It's clear what was really at play here. Someone needed a commission and daddy came in to make sure he'd get it even if it cost other people their jobs.
During one round of layoffs the AOL cronies proceeded to lay off as many of the legacy Neustar employees as possible. While they were laying people off because of budget cuts they purchased around a million dollars worth of "art" to hang in the corporate office.
Witch hunts were all too common. It was a culture of "no" and "let's blame and fire someone". The funny thing is that all of the original AOL cronies that were brought on are no longer there. Most of them were fired or forced out.
I should get into the annual review process. Basically, the policy is that something like less than 1% of the company can be a 1 (highest rating), 5% can be a 2, 75% must be a 3, 10% has to be a 4, and another 10% has to be a 5.
Your actual performance has no bearing on where you rank. It all came down to politics and economics. When someone makes a 1 or 2 an certain number of people have to be made 4 and 5 to balance the overall payout.
A 5 was considered an automatic layoff at one stage. So they already had a pool of people ready to be laid off when it was time which happened once or twice a year. What actually determined your rating was if someone wanted you gone and how well you played office politics.
Upper management encouraged this practice. I've seen a lot of hard-working, dedicated employees get dumped on this way just because there was a disagreement one time or another.
There was a lot of other abuse and fraud at work. The beautiful thing about the position I worked was that I got to hear and see everything.
Do yourself a favor and stay away from this company at all cost. The benefits, as good as they were, is not worth it. All it will take is one disagreement or one mishap and you're head is on the chopping block.
