TaskRabbit reviews about "manager"

Don't let the better-than-most perks blind you from the truth. There is an expectation to work long hours and if you don't you're seen as "not committed". While WFH was an option, you were monitored closely and micro managed. There's toxicity, favoritism and lack of empathy in some of the managers that put their own success above others. Very soon, you are undervalued and that's why the turnover is high.

Wish I got to work in the office!

- Main team that I work with is in HQ which means there are late meetings with the expectation to still start work at the same time as usual which doesn't allow the work-life balance. -

Like any company transitioning out of a startup to a global leader alongside IKEA, there's always going to be growing pains. They constantly send out company-wide surveys and discuss them openly during all-hands meetings so they can improve. I've been very impressed with their transparency and commitment to the employees and Taskers.

No up-level reviews and this is desperately needed. Incredibly hypocrisy. For a company that prides itself on values such as "Caring Deeply" and "Being a Better Neighbor" as well as offering leadership development workshops in an effort to cultivate a productive work environment where people operate with integrity (i.e., not jumping to conclusions and "left-hand column" tactics), leadership tolerates openly destructive and aggressive behavior on behalf of exec. Since the acquisition, the push for "growth" in tandem with the IKEA partnership has resulted in major turnover: execs, directors and senior engineers have left as well as more junior staff who've worked with the company for years. Some rumored and very plausible reasons for departure have included new policies surrounding deadlines (without regard for the feasibility of these deadlines), a thick sense of hierarchy, getting physically sick because of the stress, and destructive / resource-draining finger-pointing. Not only does it cost a minimum of $50K to replace some of these hires, but the folks who left abruptly or who were terminated (which has its own costs) in the name of "growth" have not been adequately replaced, and the missing resources have resulted in profound disorganization. Frankly, many of those who remain under bad leadership are too afraid to communicate their needs to their boss to work effectively which has led to cascading disorganization on other teams (e.g., bad managers don't help their team prioritize and structure requests to technical team members and then those members are put in front of a firing squad). The bottom line experience for anyone expected to work on growth (which appears to be the entire company regardless of how futile and impotent this effort is) is that your gonna be caught in a totally pointless political battle where you learn nothing and are on the spot for any failures that can plausibly be offloaded to you. You'll also probably be fired because that's seems to be the default. Outside of being suddenly let-go, there are ALSO an inexcusable number of people on PIPs across the company (in some cases a department majority). At best, this speaks to terrible management, at worst it leaves the impression that the company is plagued by financial problems that they're not being upfront about and are choosing to manage people out instead. Either way, there is no excuse for not vetting the bad reviews and for creating a totally toxic work environment. And to echo what the other poster wrote, there is no clear path to advancement (put another way, you can get a bad review for totally arbitrary reasons). Most people are radically under-utilized, performing a massive amount of tedious tasks and getting blamed if anything falls through the cracks. I've watched people lose skills and become less competitive just by being here which make the place feel like an authoritarian career trap. If this is the future of work: run.

Where to begin? The app is an absolute mess and is so full of bugs and issues that Taskers are literally losing jobs over it. They can't keep enough engineers around to keep up with the problems so they are caught in a vicious circle at the moment. The organization structure doesn't completely make sense and there is a lot of overlap between certain teams and who should do what isn't always clear. It also makes it hard to get things done because you need half a dozen people's input on any one thing because of all the overlap. Since engineering and the organization are such a mess very few people actually have the tools and solutions they need to do their job effectively. Not to mention support for projects is unevenly distributed so some teams get anything they ask for right away while others languish with broken processes. To compensate for all of these issues management likes to pretend TaskRabbit has a "start-up mentality" which is really just code for the fact that none of them seem to know what they are doing. Then, despite all of this, they are still trying to move other initiatives forward that don't make any sense because the rest of the company is not aligned on being able to deliver.

“- SUPER political and hierarchical. I have lots of startup experience and have never been somewhere where sucking up is so universal and necessary just for surviving, not even looking to climb the ladder. My manager literally told me I had to play politics better to protect my career. Some people drink the kool-aid hard and think it'll save them - those are the 5-star reviews you see here. Rest assured this is a very vocal minority and the rest is silently suffering. - You may be fooled by how much they talk about their values: they do it a lot to make you think it matters. It's bull: it has absolutely no impact on how they run the organization. They're hollow enough to spin them to retroactively label things, like horoscopes, but in terms of internal organization, there's nothing "neighborly" about how ruthless and insincere people are. - Inept management, both at middle management and C-level. Priorities can change overnight because some executive hears a buzzword at a conference and decides some team needs to pivot all their resources on that. Managers are petty and thin-skinned; lots of your job will include pandering to egos of those above you. - Impossible to get promotions. The official policy bars you from promotion within your first year but in practice it takes way longer than that. People (namely women) are under leveled in hiring and are stuck there. Raises don't happen outside of promotions, either. - OKRs are totally unrealistic. Weekly status updates consistently show a failure to meet targets. Bonus payouts are dependent on success with IKEA objectives, something that only one user group works on, but everyone else's bonus is still at their mercy. For a 10-year-old organization owned by the largest furniture retailer in the world, there's a lot of excuses about how "we're still figuring things out." - If you're a woman who thinks having women in leadership will protect you from sexism, don't - the women in power care far more about protecting their political capital and relationships with other powerful men than you as a disposable peon. I've seen two people get fired, both women, and word on the street was they were both were sacked because they were unlikable. - Lots of high-profile turnover. In 2018, TR lost the VP of Engineering, Director of Product, chief architect, veteran senior engineer, and the CTO moved to Spain (but still supposedly works here?) - Official policy is that work from home isn't allowed but they keep hiring more and more remote folks who WFH full-time, not to mention have distributed teams across the world.”

- This IS a demanding place to work. If you're looking for something easy where you can coast, this might not be the best place for you. If you're looking for a challenge and are willing to put in the work (you have grit, if you will), then I strongly encourage you to apply for one of our open positions!