Paperless Post reviews

3.4

58% would recommend to a friend

(25 total reviews)

James Hirschfeld

57% approve of CEO

53% positive business outlook

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25 reviews

Reviews about "Culture"

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1.0
Mar 1, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Compensation and work life balance.

Cons

I got some great advice from a startup guru when I was first applying to tech startups: Look at how many people have left the company in the last year. If there are a lot of former employees, you know it's a bad sign and there's a problem internally - stay away. This could not be more true than at Paperless Post. LinkedIn doesn't lie, go look at the number of ex-employees, there has been a mass exodus in the last year of great talent getting out of this company for good reason: No strategic leadership at the company: The CEOs, the COO, the CPO all have no prior experience at proper tech companies (again, look this up on LinkedIn). This is a catastrophic weakness for a tech startup at a stage in need of growth. Think back to the last time you remember something innovative coming out of Paperless Post since they first began. Coming up short on examples? That's because there is no innovation coming from this company since their start in 2008. That's right. 2008 and no real innovation on the tech and product side. It is the blind leading the blind at the C level, and when smart individuals at the company try to push for innovation, it gets lost in a sea of fear of risk as there is poor understanding of what proper and healthy business risk looks like. This is due in major part to the team’s weak handle, at a basic level, of what the business drivers should be as the company grows. Top down goals of the company are non existent and no teams, let alone individuals, had clear goals to work toward. It is an utter mess. Culture of cliques: This company thrives on a clique culture where those that have been at the company the longest are allowed to push ideas through, jockey for promotions, and game politics in a way that many would consider unethical. Lack of management skill: This comes top down. Because the C team is green on tech industry depth of knowledge and has never managed teams outside of Paperless Post as this was many of their first ever jobs out of college, there is no rigor around management skill. Management has no reasonable and objective promotion benchmarks and can use the so-called existing framework ambiguity to their advantage on an extremely subjective curve - which in multiple instances I witnessed while there included cases where implicit bias and sexism were factors. I back this up by the fact that on paper, those that were getting overlooked for promotions had great track records at the company of executing and driving results. Those that did get promoted were those that had been there longest and were very close with management and the C team on a personal level. The mass exodus I mentioned is due in large part to promises of promotions with no action for months to YEARS. Yes, years. Plenty of individuals waited years for promised promotions and after getting burned over and over, they left. Conclusion: Stay away. This place is toxic.

5.0
Jan 24, 2017

Great company with an actual business model

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- people pay real money for the product - there is a direct relationship between what you work on every day and the company's bottom line rather than the latter being driven by ads or selling data. One of very few tech companies in NYC I respect for that reason. - the culture is a far cry from the typical tech bro brand of toxic masculinity. - good team with truly exceptional designers and product-focused engineers - tech team follows "best tool for the job" and there's very little premature scaling or needlessly complex architectures - founders are passionate but willing to weigh evidence and change their minds - good compensation, benefits. HR team actually focuses on culture and people, not simply recruiting + aspirational lip service.

Cons

- some growing pains like most startups of its size (but not at all corporate or inflexible). - some people who are part of the original guard didn't grow with the company and left - managers need more experience and to be held more accountable

1.0
Jan 20, 2017

A rapid and steady decline

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Good compensation - As of 2017, good healthcare and dental benefits - Generous 401k match (4%) - Excellent work/life balance with generous PTO policy - Most people are very friendly and are really smart and passionate about their work and subject areas

Cons

As others have noted, under its current leadership structure, morale and product innovation have plummeted. The engineering culture in particular has faced a precipitous decline. Teams silo themselves in their respective Slack channels and very rarely, if ever, is there any cross-team communication or awareness on what other teams are working on and what the organization's collective goals should be. All hands meetings are spectacles, complete with a clueless CTO who sputters and stammers through haphazardly thrown together presentations on company direction and goals, often leaving the rest of the team dumbfounded. Suggestions have been made for ways to combat this decline in morale, only to be told "Yes, we're working on it", with no visible results or "We don't have the resources" from managers that seem completely indifferent to these concerns in the first place. Several bad apples are allowed to rot the rest of the bunch, with brazen bullying and intimidation over the public and private Slack channels and through confrontations in team meetings. When people have complained about these issues to HR, the response is a collective shrug and "What do you want us to do about it?" Like most startups and mid-size companies, finding a trajectory for career growth is a challenge and opportunities can be limited just because of the size of the team, but management is especially opaque in what the levels are (they say "they're coming") and expect everybody to somehow just pick a ladder. **A company of this size does not even have an org chart!!** In addition, the company intends to increase the headcount of the number of software engineers without hiring in the proper support areas such as ops, that enable these engineers to do their job. Because of the lack of support resources, critical infrastructure goes unmaintained and properly deploying something can take forever. Not to mention there's a horrendous lack of documentation on anything and knowledge sharing outside of one's own team almost never happens.

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