Pros
- Wonderful dog obsessed people - Some of the best people I've ever worked with (though Rover has a really hard time the good ones, see below) - Great marketing. Rover is actually a better marketing company that it is a technology company or a service. Marketing and managing public perception of the company is more of a priority than the actually technology itself or the customer experience. - For select people, Rover really can be a career maker.
Cons
- Can’t keep their best employees. Rover hired some of the best people I've ever worked with. Unfortunately Rover had a very hard time keeping them due to us feeling overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated, and lack of career growth. Waves of great employees would leave after repeated bad management decisions. - Rover also hired some of the absolutely most incompetent people I've ever worked with, primarily managers. Like comically bad managers, who when they were hired or promoted it resulted in 75% of the existing team leaving. My favorite managers are all gone, the worst ones are still there and are still getting promoted. - Sexist managers are promoted. Female employees being told they need to be more emotionally expressive, male managers taking credit for their female employees work and ideas, erasing the female employee's contributions, etc. - Rampant favoritism. Favoritism is a huge factor in who gets promoted. - Pay is not competitive in many positions. I was offered a position at a similar sized tech startup that had lower responsibilities and stress that paid almost 50% more. Also managers talking poorly about job candidates, behind their backs of course, who ask for an entirely reasonable living wage for the position they're hiring for. Employees being shamed for wanting pay that doesn't make them live paycheck to paycheck. - Some job’s maximum annual structured pay raise percentages are less than the annual increase in cost of living. That means even if you get the maximum raise, you might still be making the same or less than you did the year before the raise. - Yes manning - There are very few people who can really express their opinions and concerns about the company, how it is being run, etc without severe consequences. Lower level employees who love Rover and want to make suggestions about how to improve things have a tendency of getting fired, laid-off, or frozen out of the organization. Doing anything but singing the praises of Rover and acting like a happy go lucky employee can get you in trouble really fast. - Fake PiPs/job security reassurances and sudden firings are common. Do not trust a manager that puts you on any sort of performance improvement plan regardless of what they call it and regardless of what reassurances they give you that you're not on track to be fired. They are just trying to keep you calm and happy while they gather enough evidence to satisfy HR before firing you. Don't believe managers when they tell you they'd been working with an employee for a while before firing them. - HR is helpless to improves systemic problems. They’re really nice people, but remember their job is to protect Rover. Too many bad managers get promoted regardless of bad behaviors. Employees who expressed concerns were gone, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes due to firings a short time later.
