Former DealerSocket - gutted and ruined (Oct 2021)
Pros
Previously, there were many positives to working at DealerSocket so you might see options in other reviews that are no longer available. The biggest positive was with the team itself. My team was composed of a mix of some longer tenure employees (10+ years if you include pre-acquisition employment) and newer (less than two years). I was there for 6 years and the teams were great throughout.
Cons
Quick TLDR: - TERRIBLE pay - No support from Exec Team - No communication on company direction or goals - No resources to do your job - Lacking in all benefits - Quality of life depends on which product you are a part of (avoid anything that is not CRM) Also quick salary thing: - onboarding Specialists/Project Managers make about 55-65. Raises are below inflation rate so what you start with is where you will stay. - Data Engineers make like 35k. I thought that was a joke when I first heard it, but I assure you it is not. Let me give you a backstory so you know how things work. DealerSocket was a CRM software company that apparently was pretty sweet back in the day. In 2014 it was bought by an investment firm Vista Equity partners. In 2015 they acquired several other companies (FinanceExpress, Inventory+, DealerFire and AutoStar. Shortly after, the CEO and exec team realized they couldnt cut it with scaling up at such a rapid rate. Attrition was high with our customers and things were getting pretty disorganized. Vista removed the CEO and cleaned house on the exec team bringing in Sejal Pietrzak, their golden girl, to make DealerSocket viable again. Things got pretty great under her leadership, it took a bit of time but things really turned around. All products were getting investment and the necessary support. Our attrition dropped significantly and our products got a lot stronger. I would rate it probably 4-5 stars under her leadership. We also acquired another software called Auto/Mate in like 2019. I dont know what the plan was there but I felt bad for them since they seemed to be better than DealerSocket. Come summer of 2021, we were told that DealerSocket was being sold to Solera along with Omnitracs (a separate company outside DealerSocket). We were told that this would be hugely beneficial to our customers and us as we would get more resources. We quickly discovered that this was actually a move by Vista to combine some of their companies so they could take Solera public or make it more attractive for a sell off since Omnitracks and Solera were both underperforming. What resulted from this was a mass layoff in August of 2021. The people laid off were a combination of legacy employees who had helped build the company and new employees. They never gave us the numbers but it was around 200 people. Without these people, supporting our teams and customers become impossible. All financial resources were pulled way back and our already skeleton crews were left to clean up a mess that will take years to fix. It has become clear that the intention is to push out the people that they think were paid too much and replace them with outsourced team members. I decided to leave when much of my team was laid off. I couldnt stay behind and risk being a part of a layoff of which there was a second round in October.
