Opower reviews

- Recently announced that it is in the process of being acquired by Oracle, so many of the good things about it being smaller tech company may be disappearing. - In SF, there isn't anything that differentiates this company from other tech companies other than the mission is energy related. But not saving more energy, let's be clear. - Compensation is a joke compared to companies similar to it. Don't let them say they've "rigorously benchmarks" themselves against other companies similar to themselves to give competitive salaries, because they don't reveal which companies they are comparing themselves to. Companies of the same caliber as Opower and the talent Opower expects to hire are not among the companies they seem to be benchmarking against. The free food and perks are a façade so they can spend less on compensation that actually matters. - If they say the people and the mission are what bring people to Opower, only believe the people part. The mission has changed recently, away from helping utilities save more energy and closer to just finding any general way for utilities to talk to their customers. This can lead anybody to assume that energy efficiency isn't doing so well. - Development is hard to come by. You need to be a heavy self-promoter to get noticed, but not all personality types are assertive, even though they are plenty smart/capable. - Internal mobility is difficult to achieve without being buddy-buddy with mid/upper management. And when you get promoted, the compensation increase is laughable.

The management team needs an overhaul. We have a lot of terrible managers that hurt the teams, more than help. 20% of the people managers are actually good. The rest are terrible. The CEO has a wonderful way of shrouding problems. The company will switch to unlimited PTO and say "we are not taking away your PTO." However, we know that switching from accrued was to clear the books of debt. Be honest. The pay is low. When friends, from other tech companies, hear how much you are paid, their response is to offer you a job or tell you to get out of such a bad relationship. They will not tell you much about how they arrived at their numbers either. If you ask HR, they will state that they only share it with Director level people and when you ask a Director, they will tell you to go to HR. This lack of transparency is smart because they can state that "we are so proud to say that men and women are paid equally [low]." The company misleads with pictures of the company and culture that is much different from reality. Those happy people, they just found out that they are leaving. Those dogs, they do not exist in the SF office because we used our lawyers to look over how to short change our employees, instead of reading a rental agreement that states "no dogs." We are losing many good people. We may have more layoffs again.