A toxic company culture sitting on a financial house of cards - avoid at all costs!
Pros
- Pay is decent, the immediate team I worked with was great.
Cons
- Utterly toxic corporate culture. A clique of senior managers (none of whom seem to have matured past high school) run the company to stroke their own egos and retaliate against anyone who exposes their incompetence or merely tries to unwind the ridiculous knots of inefficient processes they have created. Anyone who crosses them is marked for retribution in the form of poor, unprofessional treatment on a daily basis all the way up to termination for trumped-up reasons. These people have caused individuals and entire high-performing teams to be let go simply because the victims exposed their incompetence with proposals that made their own ideas look ridiculous. They would rather force good talent out the door than admit a mistake. - Incompetent business practices. Senior management is obsessed with expanding market share when the company already has a stranglehold on much of the market which is likely to eventually result in anti-trust proceedings - just ask Google. There is no effort to ensure new acquisitions are profitable and profitability is often ignored even on the largest customers, resulting in several major clients causing six figure losses for the company annually. Management often ignores these issues to avoid looking bad as they are usually the ones who negotiated the unprofitable contracts. Numbers that look good on the surface are valued above all else and digging around to validate the assumptions behind them is a great way to get yourself in trouble. - The accounting department is a complete disaster. Safelite has plans to go public in a couple years yet has people leading the accounting team who don't know what SOX is. I'm not saying they don't understand aspects of it, I'm saying they don't know the law exists at all. This predictably results in all sorts of comically absurd accounting practices where money moves around with essentially zero tracking and no accountability. If you want to embezzle some money, Safelite is the place to go. - The finance department is in a similar position. The official company P&L doesn't match Safelite's own sales data, but management is unconcerned. Want to match your own numbers to the P&L for a presentation for consistency? By the finance team's own admission it's impossible, and no one outside of that team can match their numbers or even get close to them. These extremely opaque numbers are what goes up the ladder all the way to Belron yet no one knows how they are calculated or why they're so far off from the company's internal data. Safelite's numbers look good for now but their origin is suspect and are built on a house of cards in any case. - The toxic culture that starts at the top has penetrated nearly every department in the corporate office. A total lack of professionalism is the norm for the majority of employees who would rather send a nasty email in response to even the most basic polite request rather than help their fellow employees. A favorite term of employees at HQ is "we have no bandwidth" so if you're trying to get help or data from another team prepare for an odyssey filled with stress and wasted time. - Managers (even high-level executives) who are not part of the senior management clique I mentioned earlier are so afraid of their influence that they often won't stand up for their own teams when they are unfairly attacked. So don't expect backup if you're going into a tense meeting with these people, expect to be thrown to the sharks. - Safelite's technology is awful. The company relies on 40 year old crash-prone programs that are completely inadequate for their current needs and are a constant thorn in the side of employees trying to get work done. - In June the company laid off 450 people, supposedly due to Covid impact. The shutdowns did have an effect on sales but before the layoffs the executive team was touting a recovery that was above expectations yet they let hundreds of people go anyway. The Monday after the layoff a large conference call was held where the CFO bragged that the company projected an all-time record profit for 2020. I could go on but hopefully you get the point - Safelite HQ is not a place you want to work if you like your sanity intact and blood pressure at healthy levels. It is a company with massive potential being run into the ground by people who put their own egos above all else and are more than willing to damage the company, both financially and by driving talent away, to prevent those egos from being bruised. Stay far away and don't let the recruiters lure you in with lies about how great a place it is to work.
