Look up “Euro-Pro” on Glassdoor, as SharkNinja was named this up to 2015. Since the company hasn’t claimed the profiles, reviews are not consolidated. Just for more context.
Also, as of around late 2019, Mark Rosenzweig is no longer the CEO. Xuning Wang of JS Global is the CEO of SharkNinja as a result of a combination of JS Global acquiring SharkNinja around 2017 and their IPO on the Hong Kong stock market late 2019. Mark Barrocas remains President of SharkNinja and essentially the face of the company internally. Just in case if you care about that kind of stuff.
Lack of Work/Life Balance
Be prepared to sell your soul to this company, wherever department you reside in. I should’ve put as a “pro” that depending on the number of years you’ve racked up at the company, you can carry over 40+ hours of vacation time to the next year. However, it seems like a lot of accrued hours per year get burned because people can’t take them due to the company demand. Everyone is at the beck and call of “The Marks” and with no real structure, every team’s initiative is suddenly top priority. So if you decide to buy in on what SharkNinja is putting down, be prepared for long hours in and out of the office (and sometimes weekends too!). This is ever so important during the summer/fall, when new products are coming out.
Career Growth Based on Saying “Yes” to Everything Or Just None at All
Poor work/life balance is in direct correlation to lack of career growth or opportunities at the company. The “say yes to everything” methodology is quite important here because it actually determines how you will grow and be recognized at the company. Also, since upper management enjoys handing out VP and Director titles like candy, you can forget reaching those levels unless you’ve sold your soul for 5-7 years, granted the turnover here is about 1-3 years at all levels.
For IT/Developers
If you’re someone who’s looking to be a help desk tech, security admin, or server admin, this place might work out for you, despite everything I’ve said above. The reason why is because those 3 specific IT roles are essential for any company, no matter what industry you’re in. However, if you’re looking to be a web developer, application developer, BI developer, or database admin, I would highly suggest looking elsewhere. If you’re a software engineer with C or C++ experience, try looking for a role under robot engineering.
What I’ve written shows an underlying problem. Engineering and development are kind of separated into different functional groups, therefore, a different level of company investment (dollars) in those groups. With the rest of development housed in the IT department, there won’t be any investment in your growth or the tech stack or systems, since under traditional IT, they’re just there to keep the lights on for the rest of the company. So the developers working on getting data for the other departments to do their work and to keep their chicken scratch eCommerce site running, get no investment in resources or upgraded systems. You will always be overwhelmed due being understaffed and your tech stack will become dated to the point that trying to upgrade will only make things worse and you’ll have to wonder if just starting from scratch is a better option.
The leadership to represent the needs of IT at the top level has been nonexistent. If the company is unable to invest in IT as a department or at least make the structural changes to ensure developers in IT get the same level of investment as say, robot software engineers, then whatever I have mentioned will continue and your work/life balance and career growth will suffer for it. It is career suicide to be a developer in this department.
