Pros
When I first started at RV in 2015, it was the best company I had ever worked for. I loved going to work each day and have contributed significantly to what made RV successful. I also liked the subsidized lunches, unlimited PTO, flexible hours, and many company-sponsored events.
Cons
Buckle up, there's a lot. Let's preface this with the fact that I was at RV for almost seven and a half years; I've got a lot of experience with RV. I was constantly a top performer in annual reviews. Despite all of that, I was chosen as 1 of 5 people to be laid off from a group of over 100 people at the end of 2022. I was not paid fairly based on market value, so compensation was not a factor; they just "didn't have a spot for my skillsets anymore." Now that I've been away for over 6 months, I continue to hear from co-workers on the inside that it's been getting increasingly worse. Layoffs continue to happen, people fear for their jobs, and for the people still there, they are cutting access to tooling and services just to penny-pinch wherever they can. RV is hemorrhaging; they are losing money and valuable people. The reason I say all of this is to warn you not to work here, at least for the foreseeable future. Prior to RV's layoffs, these are the cons: - They claim to be transparent about compensation and roles, but will change their documents to "better match market value" and pay people more coming in while ignoring the people who've been loyal. But in all reality, they come up with these wide pay ranges and always claim you start at the bottom of the range. - Management is a hit or miss. I had over 18 managers in my 7 years and several periods of multiple months without a manager. Only 4 of those 18 managers actually wanted me to succeed at the company. The rest mostly ignored their direct reports until they found a problem with you or when it was time for annual reviews. - Promotions and raises (pay for performance only) are always at your manager's discretion. Even if a manager tries to fight for more money or a promotion, HR will typically push back. I spent about 3 of my years with direct reports and went through this process a handful of times. If you have only one or two (really good) managers for your time at the company, you'll be promoted and get annual raises. If you have 18 managers in 7 years, no single manager has context of what you've been doing and how well you work, so you start over each time. This won't be everyone's experience, but I know a handful of other people this has happened to at RV. - When most of us were in office, they would have us move desks, sometimes between buildings, multiple times a year. God forbid if you are taking a vacation during one of these moves, you'll lose all your equipment and personal belongings as typically the person moving into your desk would throw away, take, or throw your stuff into a corner somewhere. - They entice you with all these cool things at the office like a basketball court, bowling alley, fitness center, pool table, video games, etc. For my first 2 years at RV, I was able to use all those things. Then they started overworking everyone so much that no one was really able to use these things. And when you had time to finally use them, they were either closed, broken, removed, etc. The bowling alley is famous for always being broken. - The benefits were surprisingly really good, probably the best health insurance I've had. That is until 2022 when they decided to change providers and plans. The employee costs went up anywhere from 20-40% and the amount of coverage was severely reduced. They made this change because they wanted to provide coverage for gender reassignment surgery for less than 1% of LGBTQ+ people at the company. While I understand this can be important, it's tough that everyone else is paying for it in the increased costs while being cut from seeing certain specialists and reduced coverage for other medical expenses. I wish that RV explored other options, such as having supplemental coverage that did not impact the rest of the company. - I'm all for equality and diversity across the board, but this was such a priority for RV that it was detrimental to long-term goals. While they hired many well-qualified candidates as part of this effort, there were also many cases where they hired underqualified candidates just to meet a quota. I don't know everyone who has been laid off, but from what I've seen so far, people who help their diversity quotas are not part of it. - The CEO and others in senior leadership talked a lot about politics during company meetings and during certain events. While my opinions do not match the views they have, I felt like they abused their role in the company to push an agenda, almost to the point where it was belittling people who do not share the same views. Politics should be left out of the workplace, especially from senior leaders of the company. - Lastly, they used to have yearly company trips. I was lucky enough to be able to go on two of them to Cancun, but these trips were shut down after Ric claimed the company has grown beyond the ability to have these trips anymore. They went from a 3-day, all expenses paid, trip to a quote "better than Cancun" 2 day meeting in the offices full of biased speakers and corporate-like business reviews, called "CultureFest." The funny thing is, CultureFest actually killed the positive culture at RV. Now it's a culture of fear, unhappiness, and tired people; but hey, they have a broken bowling alley at least. It's sad because RV got itself in this predicament, and now it's affected what used to be one of the best companies to work for. Ric and the investors never knew when to stop acquiring new businesses, hemorrhaging tons of money into companies like CNET, which Viacom couldn't wait to be rid of. RV has a growth problem. Too much growth in too many sectors with senior leadership having zero knowledge in the sectors (or verticals as they call it) they are running. Now they have a ton less staff due to layoffs, but now the people still around are doing 2-6 times the amount of work. All my friends and previous co-workers still at RV have expressed, on several occasions, they are extremely unhappy and actively looking for something else. If my predictions are correct, RV will sell off most of its assets in the next year or two. I really hope RV turns back around again, but as of right now, they seem to be far too gone.
