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Smartfrog&Canary

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Smartfrog&Canary reviews

4.5

89% would recommend to a friend

(86 total reviews)

Charles Fraenkl

94% approve of CEO

88% positive business outlook

Smartfrog&Canary has an employee rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars, based on 86 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Smartfrog&Canary employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

86 reviews
3.0
Jul 31, 2016

Mismanagement or intense growing pains?

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Really great benefits for a startup from daily catered lunch to "unlimited" time off (but work keeps going even when you're gone, of course). 401k (unmatched) is a bonus though. Unlimited snacks and beer on tap. - There's always work to be done and there are many opportunities to learn from other teams if you so wish. If you have the drive, there's never a reason to not be doing something. - A lot of cross-team collaboration. There is a lot to learn about how a business operates and cross-team work is integral across the company. - Generally laid back culture but driven for the work. Work expectations are dependent on team. Generally as long as the job gets done on time, there are no real time requirements. This is both a pro and a con as that means there is oftentimes no sense of real urgency. - Growing at an incredible pace for both hiring and product development. A lot of innovation and continual improvement to current systems. Since projects are coming so rapidly, you feel like you are always part of a new learning experience. - Office space is a huge old reclaimed warehouse. Tons of space (though not enough meeting rooms). - Company vision is clear.

Cons

- Lack of effective communication from management. Leadership focuses on the "good" and not enough on what is not working well despite the constant claim that transparency is so important. It's all well and good to try to boost morale, but I don't this is really working. - Very limited upward mobility. Lots of emphasis on improving this, but little actually done. Consistent undervaluing of talent has led to many recent turnovers. - Employee-to-Company feedback during a formalized feedback process seems useless. Interestingly, most employees did not believe their feedback would change anything anyways (that was a question on the survey). It feels as though upper management cares less and less about the individual, a far cry from the company a mere year ago. - Generally disorganized. Team managers have little to no experience managing people and a lot of information is kept "close to the chest" for no real reason. Team leads are often spread too thin and that lack of focus trickles down to affect their team members. Lots of last minute deadlines due to a random "bright idea" or general poor communication/planning.

1.0
Oct 20, 2018

Poor financial management led to downfall

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great coworkers. Before 2018, this company still had lots of employees and great coworkers. The office was great and lunch was provided.

Cons

Many of the employees had left and the office is not as great. For a hardware company, it lacks too many key positions to enable development. Poor product decisions were made that critically affected the customers. Canary had to make decisions to recover from the poor financial management, now it has to make decisions to recover from becoming irrelevant in the market.

1.0
Mar 30, 2018

Market opportunity missed

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Back in 2015- 2016, the team was incredible. Canary was the first smart camera product to hit the market. Amazing times at the company, very optimistic about the outlook.

Cons

From there on, the company went downhill. Instead of focusing on the end user and letting product/tech drive, the focus was on the CEO's vision. Except, parts of the vision that were realized did not yield expected results, so priorities were constantly changing and that resulted in a lot of frustration, missed deadlines and barely any movement forward. Management thought the problem was execution. Rest of the company thought the problem was the direction. Still, making end users as happy as possible was never first on any list of priorities. Fast - forward to now. Nothing's changed, except almost everyone who wasn't fired in a few rounds of layoffs has quit.

Viewing 4 - 6 of 86 Reviews

Glassdoor has 95 Smartfrog&Canary reviews submitted anonymously by Smartfrog&Canary employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Smartfrog&Canary is right for you.