Unclear expectations and lack of process leads to ridiculous schedules, horrible management and no help from HR for employee onboarding or training in any way.
Sharkninja is by far the worst place I've ever worked. I took an engineering management job there with the highest of hopes, despite reading dozens of horrible reviews on Glassdoor. I bought into the lines from the HR team during the recruiting process ("we're changing the culture", "you're going to be part of the change", etc.) and decided to give it a shot because I heard they were going to invest in some innovative new IoT-connected products. Big mistake.
The President (Mark B) and CEO (Mark R) conduct weekly or even sometimes daily product review sessions with the entire team for a particular product. The team is tasked wth creating a giant PowerPoint deck and sharing the current status of every details with "the Marks" who spend their time rolling their eyes in disgust or whispering to each other before lambasting the employee, no matter what level, tenure or role the person has in the company. I've seen then rip apart an employee who had been on the job for 4 days but was thrust into giving the Mark & Mark update. The guy didn't even know where the bathroom was yet. These product review sessions are often rescheduled multiple times due to the Mark & Mark schedule, so you have 20,30 or 40 people sitting around (sometimes for hours at a time) waiting for the meeting. It's a horrendously inefficient use of very expensive people's time.
There is NO training. None. Everyone is too busy to help you get adjusted to the job or company and you are expected to just know what to do. Being a smart person who'd done the job before, sometimes you can find your way through but then again, the Marks might think you should be doing something completely different. So any work you are doing might be completely for naught. Many people work there and have zero job descriptions and have no feedback from their management chain - so you just work on what you THINK is important and then wait to get ripped apart in some Mark & Mark review session.
Sharkninja pretends that they are "agile". While they move at a very rapid pace, it is mostly due to the petulant pendulum changes due to the whim of the Marks. They decide they don't like the shape of a part on a vacuum and all of a sudden, the whole team is redesigning it, trying to change machining on factories in China, etc. This wastes time, resources, money and burns out the Engineering and Quality teams. In truth, the company rarely writes anything down in the way a professional product development company would - so the concept of agile is really just that - a concept but no one there really understands agile & scrum so it's just lip service.
Sharkninja was bought last Fall by a Chinese Private Equity firm. Any hope of it becoming a fun, rewarding place to work went out the window when that transaction was signed. I am sure there are aggressive earn-outs for Mark and Mark - thus they are driving the company to just deliver more and more product with less resources.
From a market opportunity perspective, the company is lagging others in both the vacuum and kitchen markets. Shark released a robot vac last year and it is not even listed in any reviews anymore - so basically that market is now iRobot only (with a small slice for Neato). Shark has no innovative products coming down the Pike. They are a copy-cat org and the reality is that there are plenty of Asian copycat product companies that do it better than Sharkninja at half the price.
If you're desperate for a job, go ahead and join but get yourself a rock-solid contract ahead of time - one with a strong severance plan if/when Mark & Mark decide they don't like you. If you have any other options, take them and laugh when you read another 100 horrible employee reviews on SharkNinja.
