I was hired in as a base level developer right before the pandemic started. Spent most of my starting time just doing production support work: fielding support tickets, checking data in databases, creating/scheduling change requests, or rerouting tickets that were erroneously submitted to my team (this was a very common occurrence, as the service desk had very limited knowledge of which team was actually in charge of certain sections of our internal applications.) Once the pandemic started, we moved to remote positions. During this time, I was fully remote, and things were still alright. Projects were coming in faster and faster all the time, with tighter and tighter deadlines, but work was getting done, and I even received a few team awards as recognition of my contributions to work that positively impacted the business.
Yearly goal reviews were hard to understand, but at least consistent. “Exceeds Expectations” were rarely given, and “Meets Expectations” seemed to be the standard, but that’s not new for any company, I feel. I did get “EE” twice in my time, though they were only on individual sections, and never on the overall rating.
However, things started to go downhill pretty quickly over the past couple years. More and more focus was being put on coming into the office. It was once a week, then quickly started ramping up faster: for Columbus based associates it was going to be 3 days a week, and for ALL Ohio based associates outside of Columbus it was to be once a week, regardless of distance from office, and at the time I was there, no compensation for travel distance was being offered or given. This was becoming a problem for me, as the amount of distance I was driving was easily ballooning to more than I would’ve been driving had I still been living in Columbus.
We had several layoff rounds during my time here: first was during the beginning stages of the pandemic. Many contractors were let go, with the intention to focus on relying more on our internal talent. This was later counteracted by bringing in more contractors years later for a bunch of projects which ended up having to be redone by internal staff anyways due to poor work done by the contracted workers, basically doubling our workload for no real cost savings. Second that impacted me and my team was in August of 2025, in which many key senior members of my team were let go, as well as my direct manager at the time.
On top of that, my team being small but with many responsibilities under our belt were constantly inundated with project work that pulled us in 6 or 7 different directions. As well, our small team on-call rotation was extremely small and stressful. Our reporting systems were constantly sending false-negative alerts, which would wake us up consistently throughout the night during my on-call periods. Work was being done to resolve this, but it never got much better. The August layoff only exacerbated this issue by shrinking the number of FTE members on my team who were capable of being in the rotation.
At some point, I had been made the defacto release coordinator for my teams technology stack. This required me to spend quite a lot of time gathering task details, constructing change requests, attending change meetings, and early morning releases. I want to say I was doing that for about a year and half on top of all my other work. I had trained a few people on the process near the end of my time, but most of the time I was still involved heavily in this process on top of my other responsibilities.
Much work was done to move our datacenter offsite. The reason for doing this was to get the hardware out of the office, but a secondary purpose was to build a connecting bridge between the 4th floors of both buildings, of which the datacenter was in the way of. This was something that, as far as I could see, had no reason to be done. Remodeling the 4th floor would’ve been enough, but the bridge was overkill. But of course, raises were bare minimum when they happened, so I guess we know where the money was coming from.
There was also this big hooplah that was made by the CEO of her "virtual avatar," a cartoonish charicature of her that could be used in corporate presentations, promotional materials, and other such nonsense. I don't know why so much was spent focusing on that, when the average employee could care less. Feels like an excuse to use her image in presentations to the company while allowing her to spend more time NOT actually being on camera for those, leading to even more feelings of the company not actually caring.
At some point, the company restructured the requirements for the different roles, and how one qualifies for those promotions. Despite all my best efforts, with 5+ years in the company, and despite all the work I did with my many responsibilities, I was unable to achieve these nebulous "goals" and was never promoted, though my experience would put me at a senior software engineer level.
I don’t feel like upper management ever cared about me, or for that matter, many of the corporate employees: at the end of 2024 going into 2025, I had a major life change that forced me to work during an incredibly difficult and stressful situation, making many personal accommodations and sacrifices for the business in order to make sure the work was still getting done. I was still doing good work, and was receiving positive feedback from my manager - Project work was slow but steady, as I was dealing with many cross-team commitments, and other team's lack of understanding of priority of my own work. I eventually had to take some FMLA, and upon returning to work had to deal with the project I had left which had not made any progress by anyone else while I was out on leave. I received my yearly review, in which I received "exceeds expectations", and then not long after was hit with a PIP for “not meeting performance expectations” due to said project being behind (though as stated, no effort was made to my knowledge by management to keep this project moving forward in my absence, which was communicated well in advance) as well as something relating to the on-call rotation. This was confusing to me, as I was just told by my manager that I was doing a good job. PiP follow-ups progressed steadily upwards for a month and a half and I thought things were going better. Work on said project continued, with more and more roadblocks and hiccups happening that were outside of my control, as I was reliant on other teams to get me information or mockups: information from the architecture team was either woefully incomplete, or poorly researched and required me to further research new solutions, and mockups were slow work, as UX team gave us 1 person, and their time was split between this and other "more important work," regardless of the fact that this project was on an extremely tight deadline and of extremely high priority.
I was then let go one week to the end of my PIP period by an upper manager who had been brought in during my life change who had no knowledge of my history or past work. I did not feel like I was represented well, nor advocated for by my direct manager. HR was not present during this firing. To top it all off, Safelite corporate actively fought against my seeking unemployment to the point that it escalated to a hearing by ODJFS and my direct manager and an ADP representative were sent to the hearing. They did not present a strong case and the hearing agent ended up determining that the firing was, indeed, without just cause as there were several failures on multiple levels regarding the inciting incident of the initial PiP as well as the alleged incident that caused the firing. Nothing says 'secure in firing decision' like paying your current employees who, you'd think, would have their time better spent doing other things, drawing out an unemployment case for three months rather than taking the obvious loss that you knew you had. Based on everything that happened during my end of employment, I can only feel that this was a retalitory firing, based on my remote status; as far as I was aware, and in communication with a few ex-coworkers, no one on my team had seen this coming, and were shocked at the outcome.
I have since seen in other reviews that they are moving to a 4-day in-office mandate, despite not being done with construction yet. I'm not surprised. It seems that Safelite's priorities are out of sync on every discernible level. Why not just mandate a full RTO at that point so that people can stop working under the dilusion that you actually care about a flex-work arrangement? You have and will continue to lose talent because of this. I'm also not surprised to hear that it is being marketed under an almost propaganda-like campaign that employees actually 'wanted' this. That's being echoed across the industry to be unfailingly false. Nobody wants to spend zoom calls with toxic leadership let alone come into an overcrowded office space to 'pretend' to collaborate, despite remaining in those same zoom calls, just with in-office micromanagement thrown on top. If you want to justify your corporate leasing space, just say so.
The company culture had deteriorated year after year, and the constant reminders of the “company ideals” plastered on all the walls was just a slap in the face every time I was in the office. I do not recommend working here under any circumstances. Mounting pressure from multiple conflicting projects, misguided business decisions in the name of profits, understaffed and overworked teams, endless corporate bureaucracy – the list goes on. Safelite may have been a good company at some point in time, but I’m not sure I ever truly saw it. They want to try to say they are a technology company, but so many of their decisions are backwards, behind, out of touch, or all three. I might’ve been proud to say I worked there at one point, but near the end and especially now, it’s just something I can’t look back fondly on.
